4 ms·

The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's

by yorwba 7y ago

The traditional Mongolian script is notable for being written vertically, which breaks a lot of assumptions usually made in UI design. The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/

ah-ha 7y ago
Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.
- yorwba 7y ago
  Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
  - nordsieck 7y ago
    > Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
    - elros 7y ago
      This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
      - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
        > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
        L_Rahman 7y ago
        It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
        dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
  - Koshkin 7y ago
    In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
- seanmcdirmid 7y ago
  It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
  - KMag 7y ago
    Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
    - mytailorisrich 7y ago
      Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
      - bane 7y ago
        I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
    - koenigdavidmj 7y ago
      A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
- bmn__ 7y ago
  Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script
simonh 7y ago
That's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.
- mhotchen 7y ago
  Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
Cthulhu_ 7y ago
I like that, that is, the new take on UI with having vertical script. I mean there was a design website posted on HN the other day (it was a list of colors I believe) which also had vertical (English & Japanese) text. The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.
chrismorgan 7y ago
That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed. I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure. With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it. With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.) It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge. I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.
- athenot 7y ago
  Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling. I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.
robocat 7y ago
Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“
- tapirl 7y ago
  A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?
  - Ericson2314 7y ago
    Oh duh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet the syriac whence it came was right-to-left, and by rotating the English in the other direction they both go down.
rozab 7y ago
Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.
- bangonkeyboard 7y ago
  Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
  - rozab 7y ago
    Yeah I figured that was the case for arabic but in hebrew the most significant digit seems to be said first
  - function_seven 7y ago
    Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
    - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
      Historically, yes, exactly. Modern conventions now favor the left-to-right numeric readings for interoperability.
  - danans 7y ago
    > Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words. > they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words: thir-teen == three and ten four-teen == four and ten fif-teen == five and ten In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right. For example: 42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40) 142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)
soperj 7y ago
I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.
reaperducer 7y ago
The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/ I found that surprisingly interesting. Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.
black_puppydog 7y ago
Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!
finiteloops 7y ago
Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"
zaat 7y ago
When the page was opened I immediately tilted my head to "correct" the page, a totally unconscious reaction, much deeper than assumption.
- pmiller2 7y ago
  Me too. The menu bar on the left hand side is a big visual clue, I think.
  - zaat 7y ago
    I checked the English version, looks totally different, but the images are the same and I guess the content is as well. There is a link on the menu bar, the address is: https://president.mn/en/ https://president.mn/en/

by yorwba 7y ago

ah-ha 7y ago

Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

yorwba 7y ago
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
  - elros 7y ago
    This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
    - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
      > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
      - L_Rahman 7y ago
        It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
        dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
- Koshkin 7y ago
  In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
- KMag 7y ago
  Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
    - bane 7y ago
      I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
  - koenigdavidmj 7y ago
    A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
bmn__ 7y ago
Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script

simonh 7y ago

That's beautiful, thanks. My wife is Han Chinese from Inner Mongolia, where the traditional script is used widely in signage, posters, dual-language leaflets and such so I'm quite familiar with the look of traditional Mongolian script. In fact until now I had no idea Mongolia itself largely used a different script.

mhotchen 7y ago
Mongolia adopted Cyrillic during its early communist years which saw heavy influence from the USSR. They started adopting their traditional script in schools again a few years ago, but the older people didn't know how to read or write it unfortunately. I saw the traditional script being used sparingly in Ulaanbator around 2017 but as for the rest of the country I don't think I saw it at all, except in Buddhist temples (which were also mostly destroyed during the communist era unfortunately).
mytailorisrich 7y ago
Mongolian is also one of the scripts on Chinese bank notes, along with Tibetan and Uyghur, in addition to Chinese characters.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

Cthulhu_ 7y ago

I like that, that is, the new take on UI with having vertical script. I mean there was a design website posted on HN the other day (it was a list of colors I believe) which also had vertical (English & Japanese) text. The closest I've worked with is a booking website for an international parcel delivery company. We offered the application in idk, dozens? of languages. Hebrew was one of them, it's a right-to-left language and our whole website became right-to-left when switching to that, so the main menu was on the right instead of the left, things like that. Great work by our CSS people.

chrismorgan 7y ago

That website confirms one of my greatest fears about this sort of thing (which I am otherwise moderately thrilled about): that scrolljacking is going to be widely employed. And scrolljacking is always bad, I have concluded. I have not encountered a single site that scrolljacks and does it right (whatever “right” means), though I have encountered two in the last decade that were quite close, but still definitely failed. I’m using a Surface Book, which has a touchpad with precise two-finger scrolling. I use Firefox, and I tested it in Chrome and old Edge too just to be sure. With JavaScript disabled, I can scroll horizontally and it works well. I like it. With JavaScript enabled in Firefox and Chrome, scrolling either horizontally or vertically caused unreasonably fast horizontal scrolling. My guess is that it’s just scrolling the page a certain number of pixels horizontally per wheel event, and ignoring the delta which precise scroll devices provide. Even if it took the delta into account it’d still be wrong to scrolljack in this way because preventing the browser from doing the scrolling breaks inertial scrolling so that it cannot feel native. (This is a large part of why I say that scrolljacking is unconditionally bad: I believe that it’s genuinely impossible for web content to scrolljack and feel right, because the web platform doesn’t expose the necessary details.) It behaves itself on old Edge, but has other layout bugs, which introduce a vertical scrollbar. I suspect that the scrolljacking script is detecting something (browser or vertical overflow) and disengaging, rather than that the scrolljacking is perfect on Edge. I’d say that user agents should be responsible in cases like this for translating vertical scrolling into horizontal on such pages. Not user code. And definitely not if I scrolled horizontally myself and am using a device that reports deltas.

athenot 7y ago
Horizontal scrolling seems to work just fine (macOS with Magic Mouse; same with trackpad). The fact that they included a workaround for those who don't have input devices with horizontal scrolling is a nice touch, yet it didn't interfere at all with my horizontal scrolling. I'd say this is a decent tradeoff.
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  But that’s just the thing, and why scrolljacking is so bad—I’m on a platform with excellent horizontal scrolling facilities, and it’s ruining that. Based on my experience in this space, but not their code which I haven’t seen, I guess that this will affect at least all Windows users with precise touchpad scrolling. From my perspective, it’s a terrible trade-off. User agents need to handle this better, urgently.

robocat 7y ago

Here’s an example of a form: https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 https://president.mn/mng/?page_id=72 It shows multiple design issues, how some are resolved and some are not. From Wikipedia: “it is the only vertical script that is written from left to right. (All other vertical writing systems are written right to left.) This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anticlockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.“

tapirl 7y ago
A combined influence result of ancient Chinese writing style and Arabic?
Ericson2314 7y ago
And yet the english characters are rotated clockwise?
- Ericson2314 7y ago
  Oh duh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sogdian_alphabet the syriac whence it came was right-to-left, and by rotating the English in the other direction they both go down.

rozab 7y ago

Fascinating, thank you. It's interesting how the Arabic numerals in the dates are flipped 90°, as opposed to in some right to left scripts where they are just reproduced as is. I've always thought this would hinder the flow of the reading, but I suppose small numbers (for most people) are instantly recognised rather than being parsed left to right.

bangonkeyboard 7y ago
Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, where they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. It was when the numbers were imported into left-to-right scripts that the order of digits was reproduced as-is, but read backwards.
- rozab 7y ago
  Yeah I figured that was the case for arabic but in hebrew the most significant digit seems to be said first
- function_seven 7y ago
  Wait, so 1,672 in arabic script would have appeared the same way, but would have been read as (something like) "two seventy six hundred and a thousand"?
  - bangonkeyboard 7y ago
    Historically, yes, exactly. Modern conventions now favor the left-to-right numeric readings for interoperability.
- danans 7y ago
  > Arabic numerals originated in right-to-left languages, This is incorrect. They originated in the LTR writing systems of India, which is why the full name is Hindu-Arabic Numeral System. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals If you read Arabic, this is clear because the numbers are written in the opposite direction as the words. > they were written and read starting from the least significant digit on the right. Only the ones and tens place are read from the right - which many languages do, including English in the 'teens' words: thir-teen == three and ten four-teen == four and ten fif-teen == five and ten In modern Arabic, the hundreds and above are read left to right. For example: 42: ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40) 142: maa'a (100) wa (and) ithnaan (2) wa (and) 'arba3an (40)

soperj 7y ago

I think it would be because most browsers are made by US based companies. These different modes should be options out of the box, and should have been now for a long time considering the web is international.

reaperducer 7y ago

The Mongolian president's personal website is an example of designing around vertical text: https://president.mn/mng/ https://president.mn/mng/ I found that surprisingly interesting. Then I was disappointed to see that the English version is just another WordPress site that could be promoting anything from self-help books to artisan truck parts.

black_puppydog 7y ago

Wow this is one of the very few websites I've seen in recent years that makes good use of the huge horizontal screen estate on modern displays. Love it!

finiteloops 7y ago

Curious. Left-right scrolling works as expected, however up down turns into left-right but with vertical overscroll. seems like they need an extra "overscroll-behavior-y: none;"

zaat 7y ago

When the page was opened I immediately tilted my head to "correct" the page, a totally unconscious reaction, much deeper than assumption.

pmiller2 7y ago
Me too. The menu bar on the left hand side is a big visual clue, I think.
- zaat 7y ago
  I checked the English version, looks totally different, but the images are the same and I guess the content is as well. There is a link on the menu bar, the address is: https://president.mn/en/ https://president.mn/en/