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.