Gerard Meijssen wrote:
I do understand from Gangleri that this new
functionality is horribly
broken when it comes to right to left languages.
From my experience with Gangleri's bug reports, I can safely say that what this
means is "it's hard to read the markup in a web browser's text editor,
particularly in Firefox, so sometimes people get confused and type things in the
wrong order when editing".
Unfortunately mixing markup characters, a right-to-left environment, and
left-to-right numbers and keywords often does lead to an illegible mess in the
basic text editor widgets that you'll find in a web browser.
Please note that:
1) Localized (thus right-to-left) keywords can be provided if necessary.
2) Numbers are left-to-right even in the right-to-left scripts. *You thus cannot
avoid mixed-directionality text when doing "math" stuff.*
I take it this code is
still very much experimental until it works properly for *all *the
languages Wikimedia uses MediaWiki for. It would therefore be better to
wait replacing templates until this functionality works properly.
and most importantly:
3) This is no different from the case of templates, whose syntax and markup
usage is nearly *identical* to this extension.
The argument given here thus fails on its face, as it would apply equally
against the use of existing templates.
Hoi,
The argument does not fall on its face; it only proves again that
MediaWiki is hard, arguably impossible for many, to use for languages
that are not left to right. Templates are constructs and they tend to be
local to a particular project. When the keywords are such that they are
based on choices based on the expectation of left to right languages
they are inherently broken for right to left languages.
Often it has been discussed why a Wikipedia project like Arab is not
doing as well as expected; one reason often denied is because it is hard
to understand the editing process. The net result of this 'confusion' is
that people find it too difficult to edit. From a user experience it is
MediaWiki that is broken. If we also need to cooperate with Mozilla,
Opera, Apple and Microsoft to fix this it where the browser is to blame,
we should.
Thanks,
GerardM