From: fantasai (fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net)
Date: Sat Nov 20 2004 - 15:36:31 CST
Edward H. Trager wrote:
> Hi, Elaine,
>
> There is of course no limit to how many writing systems
> one can have on a Unicode-encoded HTML page.
>
> My recommendations would be to:
>
> (1) Use XHTML
Unless you're sending with a proper XHTML mimetype, you should be using
HTML 4.01 Strict.
http://www.hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml
> (3) Use Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) classes to ... enforce paragraph and text alignment
> policies for Right-to-left languages. For example, in your CSS file,
> you might have (and this is just a very simple example):
>
> .semitic{
> direction:rtl;
> }
>
> ... and then in your XHTML file, you can now have things like this:
>
> <p class="semitic">
> עברית
> </p>
This is very bad advice. The directionality should be encoded directly
in the HTML with the dir attribute. This is because CSS is optional by
design--but correct directionality settings are not optional. They are
integral to the document, and therefore belong embedded in it. (The
CSS specification itself discourages authors from using the 'direction'
property in favor of direct markup.)
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/visuren.html#direction -
# Because the directionality of a text depends on the structure and
# semantics of the document language, these properties should in most
# cases be used only by designers of document type descriptions (DTDs),
# or authors of special documents. If a default style sheet specifies
# these properties, authors and users should not specify rules to
# override them.
See also http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-css-markup
~fantasai
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