Category: hlreq

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 following two related articles have been updated, and one new article is published.

Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML looks at ways of handling text direction for structural markup in HTML, ie. at the document level and for elements like paragraphs, tables and forms. The article has been largely rewritten to take into account recent developments in HTML and CSS. A section was added to describe the use of logical properties. The text was made more concise.

Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

Inline bidi markup examples now contains the worked examples and the descriptions of markup that were previously in the inline bidi article. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Until now, only Gecko browsers (eg. Firefox) provided support for CSS counter styles, but an update of Blink last week brought very welcome support to a much wider range of users (via browsers such as Chrome and Edge, etc.).

To coincide with this release, the Internationalization WG updated the WG Note Ready-made Counter Styles. This contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets.

The changes include the addition of new styles for scripts including adlam, hanifi-rohingya, lepcha, meetei, santali, ethiopic and chinese. Instructions were also added for those wanting to use different suffixes or prefixes, according to the context in which the counter style is used.

An update for the article Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML has just been published.

This article tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

The worked examples and the descriptions of markup have been moved to a new page: Inline bidi markup examples. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Send any comments via GitHub.

The article Can we derive base direction from language? is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 1 April.

Sometimes people wonder whether it’s possible to obtain a definitive list of language tags which indicate a RTL base direction, so that there would be no need for separate direction metadata. This article looks into whether that is really feasible. (Spoiler: The W3C Internationalization Working Group believes it is not a feasible approach.)

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

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 6 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Adlam Gap Analysis
• Hebrew Gap Analysis
• German Gap Analysis
• French Gap Analysis
• N’Ko Gap Analysis
• Osage Gap Analysis

These drafts complement the 21 Gap-analysis documents published last June.

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.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 21 documents that explore gaps in language support on the Worldwide Web. Some of these documents are from individual contributors, whereas others are the result of work in a language enablement task force. The list below points to the location of the FPWD and also to the relevant group home page or to the relevant GitHub repository where the work was done.

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

Arabic & Persian Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/alreq-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/alreq/

Chinese Layout Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/clreq-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/clreq/

Ethiopic Layout Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/elreq-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/elreq/

Dutch Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/latn-nl-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/eurlreq/

Georgian Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/geor-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/eurlreq/

Modern Greek Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/grek-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/eurlreq/

Hungarian Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/latn-hu-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/eurlreq/

Bengali Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/beng-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/iip/

Devanagari Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/deva-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/iip/

Gurmukhi Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/guru-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/iip/

Gujarati Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/gujr-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/iip/

Tamil Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/taml-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/iip/

Japanese Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/jpan-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/jlreq/

Inuktitut & Cree Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/cans-iu-cr-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/amlreq/

Cherokee Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/cher-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/amlreq/

Lao Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/laoo-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/

Khmer Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/khmr-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/

Javanese Script Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/java-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/

Thai Script Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/thai-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/sealreq/

Mongolian Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/mong-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/mlreq/

Tibetan Gap Analysis
https://www.w3.org/TR/tibt-gap/
https://github.com/w3c/tlreq/

This article introduces a number of basic concepts needed to understand other articles that deal with characters and character encodings.

The article has been updated with explanations of the terms ‘user-perceived character’, ‘grapheme-cluster’, ‘typographic character unit’, and ‘glyph’, and a warning about the vague use of the term ‘character’.

Read the article Character encodings: Essential concepts.

This article gives a high level summary of various typographic strategies for wrapping text at the end of a line, for a variety of scripts.

Read the article.