From: Ernest Cline (ernestcline@mindspring.com)
Date: Mon May 17 2004 - 12:00:45 CDT
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
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