John Cowan wrote: > > Andrew C. West scripsit: > > > Thus, if "tb-lr" were supported, your browser would display the > > following HTML line as vertical Mongolian with embedded Ogham > > reading top-to-bottom, but in a plain text editor, the Mongolian and > > Ogham > > would both read LTR, and everyone would be happy : > > I don't know about that. I wouldn't be too happy trying to read English > with the Latin letters laid out bt-rl and lying on their left sides to boot. > On paper is one thing, but on a non-rotatable screen? I don't think so.
Which may well be why CSS doesn't have "bt-rl" (It was in an early draft, but the actual recommendation does not support "bt-lr" or "bt-rl".) The lack of actual scripts that have a bottom to top block progression (as CSS would describe it) probably also played a part. Still, this whole question of what to do with the glyphs when a text is written in an unusual orientation is something that must be answered. Whether the answer should be given by Unicode is a related but separate question. CSS glyph orientation [1] is an attempt at an answer, but whether it is sufficient I can't say as I haven't dealt with it in any detail myself. [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-text/#GlyphOrientation
