As I understand i18n, it is not suitable for anything we should
be envisioning for WWW. It is not a multilingual standard,
but a method for helping software developers localize their sys-
tems. The distinction here is critical. Localization is the
process of gearing a package for one specific locale. This is
not a method for generalizing display methods for multilingual
use.
However, let me add that Motif supposedly has code for bidirec-
tional text widgets. That is, it can theoretically handle text that
includes right-left and left-right wordwrapping text. So, for
example, you could write a bilingual Arabic-English or Hebrew-
English dictionary, and expect to find facilities there for
quoting both languages in the same document (same entry, in
fact).
I should emphasize, though, that I am not a Motif programmer,
and I am told that the code described above was ifdef'd out
in the current distribution because it wasn't considered fully
debugged. The next release may have it enabled. I also know
nothing about mixed up-down and right-left or left-right lang-
uages.
Richard