On Thu, 13 Apr 2006 12:29:58 -0700 Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
In other words: the argument *does* fall on its face, but we can make a totally different argument: that it would be nice to support RTL better.
Yes, it would be nice to support RTL better.
Thanks Brion for this constructive approach.
There are many places to start, many issues have been reported and many test have been made but I see no "road map".
One of the bidirectional issues all projects could benefit from is to implement "fix location lists" for the special pages. Onece you did it one time it is trivial.
See the three pages sharing identical source code: http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Wikidata_M2:Special_pages/%21list#special... http://www.anubite.co.uk/mediawiki/head-rtl/index.php/Mw16:Special_pages/%21... http://www.anubite.co.uk/wikis/test-fpr/index.php/Farsitest:Special_pages/%2...
In these lists the position of relevant fields are preserved *regardles* of the directionality of the content. This is exactly what users would expect from special pages.
There are two more open requirements which can RTL / BiDi live easier:
Facilitate bidirectional editing / readability via a trailing escape character (as "") at the end of line http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=05121 It would be fair to allow multiline syntax in MediaWiki same as all the MediaWiki software is written.
Magic words (pedefined templates) {{UTF-8DECODE:}} {{UTF-8ENCODE:}} (optional {{UTF-8ENCODE8:}} {{UTF-8ENCODE16:}}) http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5256 This is not a constructed request. The feature can save hours.
Regarding my objections against not supporting table code in the conditional templates please respect that I tell / write what I think and that I write it now. The minimal compromise which would not harm template syntax nor conditional templates would be be the support / processing of the "trailer" in conditional templates. This is not banning as mentioned in your email:
However that has nothing to do with banning a construct that has THE EXACT SAME ISSUES AS THE TEMPLATES IT WOULD REPLACE.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
best regards reinhardt [[user:gangleri]]