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Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 11/16/07 17:43
Scripsit J.O. Aho:
> mahatma wrote:
>> can anyone tell me - are arabic text blocks (ie persian, egyptian,
>> etc) displayed right-justified, as hebrew is?
>
> Arabic is right-to-left written language and should be right aligned.
Right (no pun intended), and you should therefore use <html dir="rtl"> for a
page in Arabic or in other languages that use the Arabic script, such as
Persian (Farsi). Declaring the language, e.g. via lang="ar", is good
practice, though not practically that important, and it does _not_ imply
writing direction. By HTML rules, the default writing direction is left to
right, and consequently the default alignment is to the left, and you are
_not_ supposed to be able to override this with a language setting but by
setting the dir attribute explicitly.
(Text in Arabic is displayed right to left due to the inherent
directionality of letters, but this does not cover all aspects of writing
direction, and browsers may get it wrong at times. Hence, the dir attribute
is essential.)
> As far as I know hieroglyphs are left-to-right and should be left
> aligned.
I suppose "mahatma" meant Egyptian Arabic, which deviates from Standard
Arabic and exists as a separate written language to some extent (whereas
most other forms of Arabic are basically spoken languages only, Standard
Arabic being the written variant). There is nothing special about Egyptian
Arabic, as opposite to standard Arabic, in HTML authoring, as far as I
know.
--
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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