William Allen Simpson wrote:
(2) Display and edit as RTL. In practice, this turned out to be fairly
simple by thinking about such things as opening and closing parentheses,
rather than left and right. They simply are reversed on display.
The major difficulty, based on what I've seen, seem to be parentheses
and other punctuation in mixed LTR/RTL text. The browsers try to guess
which way these should be displayed, but they're not very good at it.
This isn't much of a problem in the displayed content, since there we
can use <span> tags to explictly set the directionality, but in the edit
box. Ironically, HTML tags themselves are a problem when embedded in
RTL text, since they themselves consist of LTR text surrounded by paired
delimiters. For example, if the source of a page contained, in storage
order, the string "HE<span>BR</span>EW", where the capitals stand
for
Hebrew letters, it may render in the edit box as
"WEspan>/>RBspan>>EH".
Not very easy to edit, is it?
As a practical suggestion, it might be a good idea to set the CSS
property "unicode-bidi: bidi-override;" for the edit box. That should,
in browsers that understand it, force all the text in the edit box to
render in the same direction. That way, on a RTL wiki, the example
string above would render as "WE<naps/>RB<naps>EH", which at least
is
less confusing than the current rendering.
In fact, I just tested it by adding:
FORM#editform TEXTAREA#wpTextbox1 { unicode-bidi: bidi-override; }
to my monobook.css on yi.wiktionary and it seems to work. Gangleri, can
you try this and say if it helps any?
--
Ilmari Karonen