Simetrical wrote:
On 4/28/07, Tim Starling
<tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Putting these characters directly into the
article text makes such changes
difficult to review and edit, since they are invisible in the edit box in
major browsers. A better solution is to use HTML's ‎ and ‏
character entities.
By happy coincidence, ‎ has roughly the same effect in the edit box as
it does in display, because the latin characters "lrm" are of strong
left-to-right type, just like the control character they represent. The
same is not so for ‏, meaning that in cases where ‏ is used, the
text remains broken on edit while being fixed on display. Here's an example:
An interesting solution. It's a shame we have to expose this
technical gibberish to editors, but until WYSIWYG I guess it's our
only option.
Even without full WYSIWYG, the RTL wikis would benefit from some amount of
scripted editing assistance, such as inserting LRE/PDF codes around HTML
tags in the edit window, while somehow preserving cursor movement and
leaving display unaffected. But it's certainly more complicated to
implement than translation.
The RTL wikis would in fact benefit from pervasive translation or
transliteration of all of HTML and CSS, as well as the remaining
untranslatable elements of wikitext such as <nowiki>.
Would it be best to alias all the RTL terms for
&rtl; so
they work in any wiki, or subst to the content language, or just not
let foreign ones work?
Assuming you mean ‏, yes I think the aliases (or at least the more
common ones should we choose to do this for smaller languages) should work
on all wikis. Use of ‏ is quite rare in left-to-right text, but
whatever use there is for it will be better served by using the
translation. We could add it to edittools. And of course it will be useful
for the multilingual wikis like Commons.
On 4/28/07, Rotem Liss
<rotemliss_net(a)fastmail.fm> wrote:
Possible Hebrew translation (in fact,
transliteration, since other options make
no sense) is "רלמ".
"rlm" stands for "right-to-left mark", so I guess it could be
translated סימן ימין לשמאל or something, and abbreviated סילש. Not
that that would be particularly more enlightening in any case
(probably more confusing than a transliteration if anything).
Understood.
-- Tim Starling