Category: alreq

The article Font styles & font fallback has now been published.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

The article Font styles & font fallback is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 3 November.

This article provides a non-exhaustive set of examples where choice of a font style may have a practical application. The existence of these distinct styles, with their practical influence on the reading of the text, has implications for fonts on the Web – you would typically want to choose a fallback font that has the same style, if one is available. We look at some implications for generic fonts and fallback mechanisms near the end.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (That will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article RTL rendering of LTR scripts suggests ways to produce runs of right-to-left text using HTML & CSS for languages that are nowadays normally written left-to-right. The use cases for this are rare, and mostly relate to academic descriptions of text in orthographies such as Chinese, Japanese, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Tifinagh, Old Norse runes, and a good number of other now-archaic scripts.

Translators are invited to provide translations.

Please raise any comments as github issues by clicking on the “Leave a comment” link at the bottom of the article.

The article “Script direction and languages” now has the title “What languages are written with right-to-left scripts?“, and provides insights into right-to-left (RTL) script usage around the world.

In a substantial revision, previous tables have been replaced with a completely new table which lists 12 scripts and over 200 languages using RTL scripts in the modern day. While it is only possible to give a rough idea of usage, the table includes information about which countries use those languages and figures for speakers of those languages. The data is gathered from the SIL Ethnologue.

The W3C Internationalization Activity has just published First Public Working Drafts for 2 more documents that explore gaps in language support on the World Wide Web.

• Perso-arabic Kashmiri Gap Analysis
• Uighur Gap Analysis

We are looking for expert contributors who can help us move this work forward by answering questions, documenting other gaps in support, and creating tests. For more information about the program, see this 15 minute overview (slides), and see the Language Enablement overview page.

The following two related articles have been updated, and one new article is published.

Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML looks at ways of handling text direction for structural markup in HTML, ie. at the document level and for elements like paragraphs, tables and forms. The article has been largely rewritten to take into account recent developments in HTML and CSS. A section was added to describe the use of logical properties. The text was made more concise.

Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

Inline bidi markup examples now contains the worked examples and the descriptions of markup that were previously in the inline bidi article. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Until now, only Gecko browsers (eg. Firefox) provided support for CSS counter styles, but an update of Blink last week brought very welcome support to a much wider range of users (via browsers such as Chrome and Edge, etc.).

To coincide with this release, the Internationalization WG updated the WG Note Ready-made Counter Styles. This contains templates for counter styles used by various cultures around the world. It can be used as a reference for those wishing to add user-defined counter styles to their CSS style sheets.

The changes include the addition of new styles for scripts including adlam, hanifi-rohingya, lepcha, meetei, santali, ethiopic and chinese. Instructions were also added for those wanting to use different suffixes or prefixes, according to the context in which the counter style is used.

An update for the article Inline markup and bidirectional text in HTML has just been published.

This article tells you how to write HTML where text with different writing directions is mixed within a paragraph or other HTML block (ie. inline or phrasal content).

The worked examples and the descriptions of markup have been moved to a new page: Inline bidi markup examples. This and various small edits, including a new set of examples with links to live versions, are intended to make it easier to read the main article and make its advice clearer.

Send any comments via GitHub.

The article Can we derive base direction from language? is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 1 April.

Sometimes people wonder whether it’s possible to obtain a definitive list of language tags which indicate a RTL base direction, so that there would be no need for separate direction metadata. This article looks into whether that is really feasible. (Spoiler: The W3C Internationalization Working Group believes it is not a feasible approach.)

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)

The article Use cases for bidi and language metadata on the Web is out for wide review. We are looking for comments by Thursday 11 March.

The W3C Internationalisation Working Group recommends that data formats and string data are always associated with information about text direction and language. This is to ensure that the data can be correctly managed when displayed to a user. This article explores use cases that substantiate the need for this type of information.

Please send any comments as github issues by clicking on this link, or on “Leave a comment” at the bottom of the article. (This will add some useful information to your comment.)