Yesterday, since Amir E. Aharoni, an RTL developer who has been
actively helping out by testing and filing RTL bugs, was at the
Berlin Hackathon along with Siebrand from TranslateWiki, it was the
perfect time to hold an RTL triage.
During the triage a developer made the point that screenshots help a
lot in RTL bugs. Often the person filing the bug does not use English
regularly so their bug report isn't clear. A screenshot that
demonstrates the problem, along with the URL that produced it, helps a
great deal.
Of course, this doesn't apply only to RTL bugs as even native English
speakers could often clarify their bug report with a screenshot.
During the triage, we looked at the list of RTL blockers on tracking
bug #745
Bug 6100 — Allow different directionality (rtl/ltr) for user interface
and wiki content
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/6100
This is a particularly important bug for multilingual sites like
Commons and Incubator. Amir has said he will be willing to test
this as soon as anything is committed and deployed on
TranslateWiki.
Of course, if this is fixed, then we'll need a way specify the
directionality for a page. Amir opened Bug 28970 to request this
functionality.
A number of other RTL bugs (e.g, 4236 “BiDi support for the
personal toolbar,” 13477 “Tabs collapsed on LTR wikis for RTL
users”, and 4236 “Bidi support for the personal toolbar”) would be
solved by fixing this bug.
Bug 28994 — Special pages such as watchlist and recent changes should be
tabular
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/28994
A few bugs mentioned RTL formatting problems on Special Pages.
Amir pointed out that much of this was tabular data that would be
better suited to table layout than list layout. Using table
layout each cell of the table could specify the textual direction
and the problems could be solved.
Amir opened this request after the triage.
Bug 13285 — Background incorrectly extended in RTL wikis when using IE
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/13285
This one actually looks like it was mis-titled. We're not
positive yet (and have asked Trevor to have a look), but it looks
like the problem was the background image for arwiki's monobook skin.
Bug 24204 — Problem with external link arrow in rtl languages
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/24204
The problem described here is actually a browser bug that we
pushed upstream last year. We decided to close this bug since it
isn't one that we can fix and the problem is already reported, and
claimed to be fixed, upstream
(
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=9272).
Bug 4039 — BiDI: please preserve dir="ltr" and dir="rtl" in TOC
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/4039
As Amir explained, this is not a MediaWiki bug, but a part of a
family of feature requests to make true BiDi editing
easier. Currently it can be solved by inserting LRMs in the right
places.
Bug 9316 — checkbox alignment in protection form
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/9316
Apparently this has been fixed … maybe in Vector, but maybe no one
has checked since Brion last looked in 2007.
Bug 12242 — directionality is not present in action=render
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/12242
If you're fetching content using action=render, it is your
responsibility to make sure it is rendered correctly. Usually,
people should be using the API for getting doing wikitext->html.
Bug 12151 — Bidi problem at Special:RenameUser
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/12151
This can't happen any more because of SUL, but even if it could,
bug 6100 (above) would probably take care of the fix.
The remaining three we discussed, we tested and found fixed:
Bug 3621 — BiDi: evaluate LRM, RLM, followed by "*", "#",
":", ";" …
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/3621
Bug 12079 — BiDi problem at History/Diffs
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/12079
Bug 12225 — influencing the BiDi algorithm to clearly distinguish
between the signature
http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/12225
Till next week, happy hacking!
Mark.