Announced on blogger today: Blogger Buzz: Three new languages and a whole new direction for Blogger
This is a useful development for the internet, these languages provide a slightly more complicated problem for web developers (and developers in general) because they are right to left, instead of left to right, like many other languages. So to implement iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn, it is a little easier to ignore the middle-east. But it doesn’t look like it is too hard to support the rtl languages… really it just looks like you need to add a value pair “direction:rtl;” to the style attribute of any element you want to support rtl, or you could add this in your CSS.
I notice that blogger have also added an attribute dir with the value rtl to the HTML root element or the BODY element.
In Whizzoo (and I suppose many other applications), we don’t know if content is right-to-left or left-to-right. But it seems this isn’t usually a problem - as long as you are aware your content is unknown! If you wrapped the unknown user content in its very own element, say a span or div, then it will probably play nicely with others.
I checked out the Al Jazeera website and a couple of blogs linked from the Blogger article:
Update: I’m not sure why Wordpress is not treating these right-to-left character sets exactly the same way as basic UTF-8 characters, perhaps I should update to the latest Wordpress; like the message above my editing screen says.
Update: I worked it out, for some reason my wordpress database was installed using latin1_swedish_ci collation. I don’t know why we use the Swedish version of latin1?? The other latin1 options are Danish, general, German, Spanish… obviously Swedish is a good match for English, but surely there are more English authors than Swedish.. or is it more politically correct… or perhaps a conspiracy crafted by Linus Torvalds? Oops, no he was just Swedish speaking…
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Blogger now in Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian…
Blogger Buzz: Three new languages and a whole new direction for Blogger…