Wednesday, October 05, 2011

#MediaWiki 1.18; RTL is no longer like Mr Bean driving in France

Support for right to left scripts is one of those un-holy grails that everybody seems to be looking for. The objective is for readers and editors to easily read and write.

When it is wrong, it feels like driving in Great Britain where nobody will drive on the right side of the road. Everything is where you do not expect it and, it looks awkward.

With release 1.18 MediaWiki many bugs that have to do with mixing and matching scripts with different directions have been tackled. On Commons and any other wiki, the sidebar will be on the side where it makes sense for the language of your preference. For languages like Urdu, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew, it will be on the right side. The content itself, in the text box will show as it should for the "content" language.

The Localisation team has been tasked to crush the rest of the RTL bugs. Guess, what we KNOW about the bugs is in bugzilla, so when there are more bugs for us to crush, this is the time to identify them to us .... and bugzilla is where we are looking for them.
Thanks,
      GerardM


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