On 2/27/07, Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hello,
Please compare
http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselan…
to
http://he.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Userlogin&uselang=he&…
On Commons, the messages appear RTL text direction which is correct,
but on the left, which I imagine is as unnatural as right-aligning for
English.
Monobook appears to use the content language to decide whether to make
the site as a whole right-to-left. I'm not sure if this is correct
behavior. Certainly the content direction should depend on the
content language, but I would think the overall page (and all
interface messages) should depend on the interface language. Can
anyone think of why the whole page should be the same direction as the
content language and not the interface language?
Should we (Commons) go and insert <span
align="right"> around every /he message?
Would this solve it?
(Would this be a *good way* to solve it?)
That would probably not be a good solution at all, and it would only
partly work. If you want to solve it on your side, rather than
waiting on software changes, ideally you should be able to do it via
CSS rules, although I'm not sure whether there's anything you can key
off of with a CSS rule to determine interface language at present.
(You may have to use JS to get the CSS rules to work, though, which is
a bad solution.)
I'm thinking we could add some more classes to the <body>:
interface-langcode, content-langcode, interface-dir, content-dir.
Then we could move all the RTL stuff into the main stylesheets, in
fact, rather than adding it conditionally as an extra stylesheet.