[xml-dev] Right-to-left with Markup

[Tim Bray <tbray@textuality.com>]

At 02:46 AM 28/09/01 +1000, Rick Jelliffe wrote:

>I am not an expert in Arabic internationalization: indeed, I cannot really
>figure out how a right-to-left language fits in with markup (do we
>symmetrically-swap the open and close delimiters of tags if the
>element names are in Arabic?)  

I did some Arabic on some powerpoint slides recently (I used
to have some grasp of the language 30 years ago) and boy it's
tough to make marked-up Arabic look sane at all.  Obviously
Hebrew too.  I suspect that people writing software for XML 
in Semitic languages are going to want to use the technique 
pioneered all these years ago by Arbortext and Author/Editor 
of putting little tag glyphs in, rather than trying to decide 
where to put the slash on the end-tag. -Tim