Re: Directionality Standard

From: 'Stephane Bortzmeyer' (bortzmeyer@nic.fr)
Date: Tue Dec 18 2007 - 04:27:15 CST

  • Next message: Richard Ishida: "RE: Directionality Standard"

    On Tue, Dec 18, 2007 at 04:42:11AM -0500,
     Behnam <behnam.rassi@gmail.com> wrote
     a message of 67 lines which said:

    > But RSS readers were displaying the content in ltr format

    If the RSS feed (you did not provide the URL, by the way) uses the
    arabic script, then, indeed, these readers are wrong since arabic
    characters in Unicode have the bidi class "Arabic_Letter" and should
    be rendered RTL, without needing HTML or Atom attributes (I do not
    think RSS has such an attribute.)

    > http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2007/05/17/reading-feeds-in-right-to-left-order.aspx

    IMHO, this page is wrong because it uses languages instead of
    scripts. There are also technical mistakes for instance they say "The
    language value must be in lowercase" while language tags are
    case-insensitive.

    > But I am puzzled why a directionality issue should be resolved by a
    > language tag in the first place,

    That's probably because *most* languages are written in only one
    script (azeri, for instance, is an exception) and therefore have only
    one directionality.

    But, you're right and they're wrong, directionality is a property of
    the script, not of the language.



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