4 ms·
How a group (of whoever they are) claim they're the standard about something in nowadays without even caring about localization ? 2 years of 'complete specs'
by 01walid 12y ago
How a group (of whoever they are) claim they're the standard about something in nowadays without even caring about localization ?
2 years of 'complete specs' without a mention for RTL and how it should be supported/written in markdown....
A bit disappointed tbh... even though it's a nice initiative...
- roryokane 12y agoWhat would they have to do differently for RTL languages? I thought that RTL is already abstracted by Unicode or something. Won’t something like the following just work automatically? > انا اسم [روري](http://roryokane.com/ http://roryokane.com/)
- 01walid 12y agoNo. It won't just work, it's even shown on your comment how awful it is. To understand what I mean, try to inspect your comment, add `dir="rtl"` to the <p> tag of the Arabic text...
- Terr_ 12y agoSince when does ASCII text support RTL? I thought the whole point of Markdown was to define a mixed-mode formatting that looked OK in ASCII and could be prettified in other contexts like HTML.
- 01walid 12y agoSince when Markdown was just about ASCII text ? then we can't write French, Arabic, Chinese using markdown ? my whole point is to define a syntax indication in the specs on how RTL elements should be identified when converted to say HTML. when converted, THAT element (or the whole document) would contains dir="RTL" attribute in its tag. for example, something like this: <-rtl-- Foo Bar would convert to: <p dir="rtl">Foo Bar </p> Prettifying won't help... RTL elements/document should be indicated in markdown
- obeid 12y agoI mentioned this on twitter to @defunkt (https://twitter.com/_beid/status/507269600401440768 https://twitter.com/_beid/status/507269600401440768) I don't agree that it should be defined in markdown, RTL languages should be detected by the parser and be outputted within a block-level element, P is good, with dir="rtl" as you mentioned.
- ma2rten 12y agoactually you could just add dir="auto" and let the browser do the detection.
- 01walid 12y agoPlease see my comment above...
- 01walid 12y agoI really disagree, RTL should be defined in Markdown,.. as the ZEN of Python says: "Explicit is better than implicit." this is a case where indicating RTL should be done explicitly, letting the parser/browser or whatever do the work still won't help. Why? think about a mixed text of one sentence/line where there's only one word in Arabic at the beginning and the rest of it is Latin... the browser/parser or whatever will think of it like LTR text because the sum of latin words > sum of Arabic words. which is False. A live example of this is Facebook. it does actually a Layout detection based on the content's language in comments. but it sucks in many cases. try to write a comment in Arabic with a mention of someone's name (the name in Latin) to see what I mean. so IMO, neither dir='auto' nor the parser can detect this implicitly, we still don't have the AI for smarter detection, even if we have, there are cases where you want RTL regardless of the content. thus it SHOULD be defined in Markdown.
- obeid 12y agoIt's not about ASCII, it's about where that ASCII is presented whether it's terminal emulator like mlterm or a text box in a sane OS like Ubunutu. RTL languages can be detected and viewed correctly without any additional information. Addendum: I'm using 'ASCII' only because in this context we are talking about 'plain text' and not the actual 7-bit ASCII. UTF-8 encoding is a given when talking about RTL languages.
- lmm 12y agoWhere does ASCII come into it? UTF-8 plain text supports RTL fine. The point of markdown is formatting that looks ok in plain text and can be prettified into HTML. It ought to work when that text includes RTL.