[Mailman-i18n] RTL and BiDi

Martin v. Löwis loewis@informatik.hu-berlin.de
08 Oct 2002 20:29:04 +0200


barry@python.org (Barry A. Warsaw) writes:

> Near as I can tell, this looks great to me in Moz 1.1.

I think Arash is pointing out that the first paragraph right-adjusts
in the Window, whereas the second paragraph left-adjusts.

If you could read Farsi, you would probably also notice that the order
of words is incorrect in the second paragraph, since the first word is
on the left end of the line, so if you read RTL, you start in the
middle of a sentence (depending on where your browser breaks the
lines).

In the first paragraph, all is fine: the first word is on the right
end of the first line, and stays there no matter how you resize the
window. This is caused by the dir="rtl" of the P element.

So, in short, you do need the dir attribute - the browser does not
automatically set the directionality of the paragraph. 

For Mailman, this means you need to augment all templates
appropriately - I guess this is usually done on the <html> tag.  If
you ever generate the HTML tag without a customization hook (e.g. as
in htmlformat.Document.Format), then this might cause a problem: you
will need to inject "DIR='RTL'" there somehow. Alternatively, you'll
have to move the dir attribute further down, to, say, TITLE and BODY.

Regards,
Martin