RE: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Hi Mordechai, Andrew already offered you some good advice. I absolutely agree that you shouldn't use graphics for the Hebrew text. Most major browsers support bidi text quite well these days (though I can't vouch for user agents on mobile devices). Since it seems you will generally be dealing with Hebrew text embedded inline in English text, I would suggest you read What you need to know about the bidi algorithm and inline markup http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/ to understand the ins and outs of this. I can't think of anything you need to add to the head element in this case. Hope that helps, RI Richard Ishida Internationalization Lead W3C http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ http://www.w3.org/International/ http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/ishida/ -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mordechai Peller Sent: 17 November 2005 11:06 To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: [WSG] Bi-directional text I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? 4. How's the browser support for bidi? 5. What should be included in the head element? Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. Who are your users?? This will help you decide which approach is best. -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mordechai Peller Sent: Thursday, 17 November 2005 10:06 PM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: [WSG] Bi-directional text I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? 4. How's the browser support for bidi? 5. What should be included in the head element? Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. Probably utf-8. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters I don't understand what you mean. it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words That wouldn't be very good for accessibility. put the definition in the alt tag. If I include the definition in mark-up, I'd use a title attribute (but since I'm not planning on using images, the alt attribute isn't an option, anyway). Who are your users?? This will help you decide which approach is best. They most likely can read Hebrew, though not necessarily very well. Similarly, their understanding would also be somewhat limited, though the text would be discussing the word so that would be a problem. What's more of a problem (as far as definitions goes) are Hebrew (and in some cases Yiddish or Aramaic) words written in a transliterated form because they have become a sort of jargon. (Interestingly, there are a few words where to use the English equivalent would hamper understanding because it's more likely that visitors would know the word in Hebrew, but not in English.) ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Mordechai Peller wrote: I need to mark-up a document (XHTML) written in English, but which includes some Hebrew words. I'm trying to decide the following: 1. How should the words be marked-up: span, dfn, or just leave them in the flow? Depends on the structure of your text and its purpose to soem extent. But considering you need to markup a change in language, I'd be inclined to use a span tag to apply the lang and xml:lang attributes. 2. Is the bdo element needed, or just the dir attribute? Do NOT use BDO, this is a bidi override, and is used to change the default directionality of characters. If it is a single work in hebrew amidst LTR text the you don't really need the dir attribute, since each Hebrew character is right to left anyway. If you were going to use a group of words or a phrase, then i'd wrap it in an appropriate element and indicate the dir, e.g. span lang=he xml:lang=he dir=rtl/span 3. How should the transliteration and translation be included: title attribute or following in the flow? Posisbly the best approach is to have the transliteration and translation in teh etxt rather than in an attribute value. One of the nice things? or is it problematic things about HTML and XHTML is that a lang declaration applies not only to the content of the element, but also to the value of the attributes of the element. A span with a 'lang=he' implies that the valuses of any alt or title attributes in this element are also written in Hebrew. 4. How's the browser support for bidi? for most browsers, its more an OS issue. 5. What should be included in the head element? not sure what you mean by this. All you should need to do is declare the encoding. Have a look at http://www.w3.org/International/resource-index.html#bidi Andrew Thanks ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
RE: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Thanks for your comments, Andrew. At least your other reply was of some use. Just when _did_ this list stop being one of altruistic support for accessibility issues and become a forum for personal insult? -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 11:14 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text
Hi Paul, Paul Noone wrote: Thanks for your comments, Andrew. At least your other reply was of some use. Just when _did_ this list stop being one of altruistic support for accessibility issues and become a forum for personal insult? My deepest apologies Paul, I wasn't meaning to be insulting. Sorry if it appeared that way. Just my frustration level at the time I read the email. When I read your email, I'd just finished doing a first pass of a review of Australian government websites with translated information, and I was quite frustrated at the peculiar interpretations of accessibility standards that seems to be out there. For instance the number of government sites that have non-English information (even in languages that use the straight Latin alphabet) imbeded in GIFs or JPEGs is much higher that I though it would be. The common practice is to create an image of text for one langauge audience, and provide the alt attribute text in a totally different language (ie English). In essence the audience of the document and the audience of the alt attribute are two discrete groups. To compound the issue, most translations are provided as PDFs, with little effort to ensure that the text in the PDF is extractable or reusable, either by a screen reader, a PDF to HTML conversion process or even a PDF to TEXT conversion. Within Australia, It would appear that when it comes to non-English language content, we tend to throw web standards out of the window. Although there are some very good examples out there, on the whole there are many very bad examples. Again, my apologies. I did not intend to offend. To explain my comment that may have appear flipant or insulting: back in mid-90s, using images of text was the only way to provide some languages on the web, since early web browsers could not render those languages. Another common practice was to deliberately identify the wrong encoding for the page and then specify fonts needed to render the page. Web browser technologies and web standards have progressed dramatically since those days. And current use of images to represent non-English language text does not comply with web standards. I find it unfortunate that the practie is still used so much within Australia government sites. Andrew -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Andrew Cunningham Sent: Friday, 18 November 2005 11:14 AM To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org Subject: Re: [WSG] Bi-directional text Umm Paul Noone wrote: Your greatest problem may be deciding which encoding to use. If your English language text will be inlcined to use a broad spectrum of characters then it may be prudent to use images for the Hebrew words and put the definition in the alt tag. images for words? sounds like an approach I'd expect in the mid to late 90s. Andrew ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help ** -- Andrew Cunningham e-Diversity and Content Infrastructure Solutions Public Libraries Unit, Vicnet State Library of Victoria 328 Swanston Street Melbourne VIC 3000 Australia andrewc+AEA-vicnet.net.au Ph. 3-8664-7430 Fax: 3-9639-2175 http://www.openroad.net.au/ http://www.libraries.vic.gov.au/ http://www.vicnet.net.au/ ** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list getting help **
