Category: alreq

All 3 major browser engines now support the ability to create custom counter styles.

This is a significant step forward in enabling fully interoperable list numbering and other counters that reflect local approaches, especially for languages with smaller speaker populations.

See the Gap report.

See also Ready-made Counter Styles to use or adapt almost 200 suggested patterns from around the world.

The Ready-made Counter Styles document provides ready-made definitions for counter styles and covers the needs of a range of cultures around the world. The code snippets provided in the document can be included in style declarations by simply copying and pasting, or they can be use as a starting point and modified as desired.

This update brings the total number of style templates to 177, covering 44 writing systems.

Substantial changes were also made to the styling and presentation. Each template is now accompanied by a set of examples, as well as an icon that copies the template to your clipboard in a single click. Another icon points to MDN’s roundup of browser support for named styles. Extensions to cover affix variants are now expressed in terms of the extends syntax.

Fixes were applied for tai-lue and warang-citi styles.

Finally, a button is provided to allow you to turn off all counter styling for the examples. That then allows you to see which styles have built-in support in the browser you are using.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has updated the article How to use Unicode controls for bidi text.

This article looks at how content authors can apply direction metadata to bidirectional text when markup is not available. It was largely rewritten to incorporate more up to date information and improve the examples.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has published the article Working with source code markup and code examples for RTL scripts.

Editing markup for pages in Arabic, Hebrew, and many other languages poses challenges unless a specialized editor is available. For similar reasons, it is also difficult to include examples of bidirectional code in explainers. This page looks at some of the problems content developers and implementers of editors are likely to be faced with, and offers some advice, where possible.

The article Working with source code markup and code examples for RTL scripts is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Wednesday 26 April.

Editing markup for pages in Arabic, Hebrew, and many other languages poses challenges unless a specialized editor is available. For similar reasons, it is also difficult to include examples of bidirectional code in explainers. This page looks at some of the problems content developers and implementers of editors are likely to be faced with, and offers some advice, where possible.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article Font styles & font fallback has now been published.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

The article Font styles & font fallback is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 3 November.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Translators are invited to provide translations.

Please raise any comments as github issues by clicking on the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of the article.

The article “Script direction and languages” now has the title “What languages are written with right-to-left scripts?“, and provides insights into right-to-left (RTL) script usage around the world.

In a substantial revision, previous tables have been replaced with a completely new table which lists 12 scripts and over 200 languages using RTL scripts in the modern day. While it is only possible to give a rough idea of usage, the table includes information about which countries use those languages and figures for speakers of those languages. The data is gathered from the SIL Ethnologue.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 2 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Perso-arabic Kashmiri Gap Analysis
• Uighur Gap Analysis

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.