Right-to-left scripts include Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana and N’ko, and are used by a large number of people around the world. If you are new to dealing with bidirectional text, getting it to display correctly can sometimes appear complex and confusing, but it need not be so. If you have struggled with this or have yet to start, this tutorial should help you adopt the best approach to marking up your content. It also explains enough of how the bidirectional algorithm works for you to understand much better the root causes of most problems, and it addresses some common misconceptions about ways to deal with markup for bidirectional content

After reading this tutorial you should:

• create effective SVG Tiny 1.2 content containing text written in the Arabic or Hebrew (or other right-to-left) scripts
• understand the basics of how the Unicode bidirectional algorithm works, so that you can understand why bidirectional text behaves the way it does, and how to work around problems
• take decisions about the appropriateness of alternatives to markup

Event: northern bloc:Creative Technology Wales, Llandudno, UK

Richard Ishida gave a presentation entitled Gwneud y we fyd-eang yn wirioneddol fyd-eang! (Making the World Wide Web worldwide) on 4 December, 2008.

Program

Comments are being sought on this tutorial prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

Information was updated about support for paths as IRIs in latest browsers. For a detailed list of changes read the full post.

The following text was changed: [[

The conversion process for parts of the IRI relating to the path is already supported natively in the latest versions of Opera and Safari. It works in Internet Explorer 6 if the option in Tools>Internet Options>Advanced>Always send URLs as UTF-8 is turned on. This means that links in HTML, or addresses typed into the browser’s address bar will be correctly converted in those user agents.

It doesn’t work out of the box as of January 2005 in Mozilla, Netscape or Firefox (although you may obtain results if the IRI and the resource name are in the same encoding). Technically-aware users can turn on an option (set network.standard-url.encode-utf8 to true in about:config) to support this, but it is not yet exposed in the user interface. There are indications that it may be supported by default in Firefox 3.

]] to [[

The conversion process for parts of the IRI relating to the path is already supported natively in the latest versions of IE7, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Google Chrome.

It works in Internet Explorer 6 if the option in Tools>Internet Options>Advanced>Always send URLs as UTF-8 is turned on. This means that links in HTML, or addresses typed into the browser’s address bar will be correctly converted in those user agents. It doesn’t work out of the box for Firefox 2 (although you may obtain results if the IRI and the resource name are in the same encoding), but technically-aware users can turn on an option to support this (set network.standard-url.encode-utf8 to true in about:config).

]]

Thanks to Ana Backstone the article “Dates and Time” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).

Thanks to Sebastian Backstone the FAQ-based article “CSS vs. markup for bidi support” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).

Thanks to K.Wiśniewski the FAQ-based article “Tagging text with no language” has now been translated into Polish (language negotiated).

These tests explore how and if a user agent supports download of font information over the Web, particularly for complex script support. Fonts are downloaded both as directly as OpenType fonts, and using an EOT wrapper. Both methods tested use the CSS @font-face mechanism.

Thanks to the microo.net editor team, Γιώργος Τσιλεδάκης, the FAQ-based articles “Multilingual Forms”, “Two-letter or three-letter language codes”, and “Non-English tags” have now been translated into Greek (language negotiated).

Thanks to the microo.net editor team, Γιώργος Τσιλεδάκης, the article “Dates and Time” has now been translated into Greek (language negotiated).