Re: an HTML question

lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk (Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit)

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Date: Tue, 31 May 1994 14:54:40 +0200
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From: lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk (Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit)
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Subject: Re: an HTML question
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Tsam <mstsam@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il> said:

>  Is there a way to do a global "reverse-order" of text inside an HTML 
>  document (from "document" to "tnemucod"...;)) ? and, alternatively - is 
>  there a utility that can perform this revrsal task in ascii ?? (which can 
>  later be converted to HTML format...)

Inferring from your email address, in particular the country code, I have this 
advice to give:

Don't do this. Its a hack. Get a browser that supports right to left ordering 
properly.

At WWW94 I spoke to Toshihiro Takada about Mosaic-L10n, the internationalised 
Mosaic, and we found that a mixture of hebrew and english was rendered 
incorrectly. (All english or all hebrew is OK). He is now looking at the 
problem, which goes like this:

hebrew-words-1 english-word hebrew-words-2 gets rendered on screen as

  hebrew-words-1 english-word hebrew-words-2|
  <<<<<<<<<<<<<  >>>>>>>>>>>> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<|margin

in other words you get the second bit of the sentence first (reading right to 
left). The correct algorithm requires scanning ahead to detect changes to a 
labguage written with a different direction, rendering it to a buffer or 
otherwise determining the length, saving the position, offsetting by the length 
and rendering it into the gap. This algorithm will also work for snippets of 
hebrew in english text.

<soapbox>
although I do not myself speak any languages that require other than ISO 
Latin-1, I regard multinational support as crucial to the success of the Web, 
assuming we want to go on calling it the World Wide Web and not the Much of 
Western Europe plus the United States Narrow Web. Otherwise we disenfranchise 
huge sections of the user population.
</soapbox>

--
Chris Lilley
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