Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

James Snell — Fri, 18 May 2007 03:05:47 GMT

While direction guessing based on the language can, obviously, work sufficiently in many cases, I would definitely be interested in your opinion of the Atom bidi attribute draft - http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-snell-atompub-bidi-03.txt, which allows the direction to be set explicitly.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

James Snell — Fri, 18 May 2007 06:27:27 GMT

Doh! Sorry, I updated the draft and forgot to update my own link to it! http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-snell-atompub-bidi-04.txt

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

rss — Fri, 18 May 2007 10:00:55 GMT

James,

Being able to set explicit directionality in a feed is certainly a useful tool for publishers to exercise more precise control over the display of their content.

However, I also believe that allowing a publisher to simply specify the feed language, and having the reader "do the right thing" automatically is just as powerful. The set of modern languages that use rtl ordering is finite, so it is not an intractable problem.

Either way, the draft appears to be fine – the design aligns nicely with the (X)HTML “dir” attribute (which is good :). I think that in the long-run, readers should consider implementing both language-based detection, and support for the dir attribute as a way for publishers to override of the default behavior. It’s certainly something we will be looking into in the future.

Thanks for the comments and the reference.

- Sean Lyndersay

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

James Holderness — Fri, 18 May 2007 21:52:27 GMT

For the record, I had considered implementing language-based detection, and reached the conclusion that it would do more harm than good. Obviously, aggregator authors will make their own decisions regarding how to deal with bidirectionality, but I would't recommend what IE is doing (at least not without more evidence that there was some value in this approach).

If you're interested, the process we use in Snarfer is described at the end of this post:

http://www.詹姆斯.com/blog/2006/12/right-to-left-rss

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

bajaifir — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 03:06:40 GMT

حاولت ان اجعل الغذاء باللغة العربية ولم انجح في ذلك هل احد تمكن . شكرآ لكم

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Long — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 14:25:59 GMT

Hi,

do you know how to setup in internet explorer 7 encoding "CENTER document" instead of Right-to-Left document or Left-to-Right document ?

many thanks

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

RSS Response — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 09:23:45 GMT

!ti t'nsi emit tuoba s'ti ,uoyknaht

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

RSS Blog — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:00:26 GMT

Very good . You are doing a great job.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

eo2 — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 20:57:26 GMT

I wish a better integration with actual email clients

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

MPcomputer — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 17:59:34 GMT

Great!!!

it is very good for persian ( farsi ) language .

با تشکر فراوان به خاطر توجه به این نکته بسیار مهم برای فارسی زبان ها

با آرزوی موفقیت

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Richard Ishida — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 14:56:54 GMT

There are some problems with this approach, as I see it.

[1] What will you do about Azerbaijani, etc.? Azerbaijani language is written in both RTL (Arabic) and LTR (Cyrillic) scripts, depending on where you live. Basing the choice on language (az in each case) doesn't scale for that type of situation.

[2] How do you cater for feeds where entries are in one language or another, or a mixture of both? This is quite common. Rather than declaring the directionality at the feed level, you need to declare it at the item level and/or within an item with mixed direction text.

[3] The language subtag should not be required to be case-sensitive, since this is not required in the original formats (see BCP 47).

I think you are limited here by the lack of proper bidi handling in the RSS and Atom formats, so looking at language is a workaround that addresses many cases reasonably well. I believe you should express it this way in your article above - not imply that this is a perfectly fine solution.

I hope that helps.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Tweaks — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 15:46:17 GMT

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Annunci Griido — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 02:31:17 GMT

Great Job. Just what I was looking for.. It's good for multilanguage sites.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

kursy jezyka angielskiego — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 22:43:45 GMT

Seems like mixture of two languages in case of Azerbaijani is too much ;)

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Simon — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:05:24 GMT

Molto interessante. Lavoro ben fatto.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Pastedump — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:06:50 GMT

Very Good. I was looking for this.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Pastedump — Mon, 05 May 2008 00:06:59 GMT

Very Good. I was looking for this.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Najlepsze Ogłoszenia — Fri, 23 May 2008 13:13:11 GMT

It's a stiupid idea. That is my opinion, bezause i read left to right. ;)

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Boszkowo — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 11:40:19 GMT

Very Good. I was looking for this.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

ogłoszenia motoryzacyjne, samochody, sprzedam samochód — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:46:05 GMT

Great article. It`s realy worth reading. I wish you further successes

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

les1 — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:29:52 GMT

Słabo znam angielski ,więc w swoim ojczystym języku muszę stwierdzić ,że jest to dobry pomysł :)

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Suplementy — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:54:09 GMT

I think it is a very good solution

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

omaha rules — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 20:36:37 GMT

Obviously, aggregator authors will make their own decisions regarding how to deal with bidirectionality, but I would't recommend what IE is doing

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

Matta — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 04:29:26 GMT

Am using this successfully in publishing content in English (one RSS feed) and Arabic (another RSS feed).

Explicitly determining the direction can be dangerous, if not well thought through. In Arabic numerals are written Left to Right within Right-to-Left text. Forcing RTL as a direction will change this. Sometimes--e.g. dates expressed as text, or code numbers for items, etc.--this forcing of RTL is required. Most times, it is not the interpretation a native would expect.

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re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

UGG Classic Cardy — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 09:05:56 GMT

Only One word to characterize such a great post “WOW” that was a very interesting read

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

hotel bangkok — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:30:34 GMT

Explicitly determining the direction can be dangerous, if not well thought through.Thanks.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

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One word to characterize such a great post “WOW” that was a very interesting read. Thanks.

re: Reading feeds in Right-to-Left order

latest news — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:08:41 GMT

Really great news for Right-to-Left language users! You are doing a great job. Now the websites should add the language value on their rss feeds.