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List:       kfm-devel
Subject:    Re: Gecko
From:       Lars Knoll <Lars.Knoll () mpi-hd ! mpg ! de>
Date:       2000-04-09 13:21:44
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On Sun, 9 Apr 2000, Mukhsein Johari wrote:

> > Unicode yes, BiDi no. They have some screenshots, but if you can read
> > arabic or hebrew, you'll notice, that all they do is reverse single
> > words. They don't reverse the ordering of the words. So it would be like
> > reading a sentence lke the following in english:
> > .car a is This
> 
> Hmm? How can this be? Isn't the word order dependent on how the file was
> 'written'? Also, since you have _whole_ words displayed correctly,
> wouldn't the reversal of word order be trivial?

No. The file is written in logical order (the order you would pronounce
the thing when speaking). The BiDi algorithm then transforms it to the
visual order for printing. So a text like the following (big letters
hebrew chars, small ones english):
THIS IS HEBREW WITH two english WORDS INSIDE.
would get reordered to:
.EDISNI DROW two english HTIW WERBEH SI SIHT

What mozilla does is to reverse every hebrew word without changing to the
correct order.

Anyway, the reversal of word order is the hard thing, reversing the order
inside a single word is more or less trivial. An example: Imagine you have
some markup in the sentence above:
THIS IS HEBREW <b>WITH two</b> english WORDS INSIDE.
The output on the screen will have to look like:
.EDISNI SDROW <b>two</b> english <b>HTIW</b> WERBEH SI SIHT

See the problem?

> > Not really what one wants, and I'm pretty sure there wont be any real
> > BiDi support in Netscape-6.
> 
> You're probably right. So, what's bidi support like in Konqueror?

More or less complete. What's missing is some things like the dir
attribute not working for lists and tables, but these are quite trivial to
fix.

> > > One question, what's XML support like in Konqy? I've not heard nor read
> > > much about it...
> > 
> > Most of the framework is there. We would just need someone to glue
> > things together.
> > 
> 
> Really? Could a two-bit hacker wannabe tackle the task? I've never gone
> too much further than "hello world" in KDE devel. Also, how does one
> develop for KDE 2 while one is using KDE 1.1.2?

You could try to if you're interested, but it's still quite some work that
has to be done, and you'll need to know some things about XML/HTML and
CSS. 

> While I'm on this track, I'm also interested to help with javascript
> support in konqueror - which of the above two task is more difficult? I
> should probably cut my teeth with the easier of the two.

That's probably easier. If you want to help on this track, you should ask
Harri (porten@kde.org), as he's the one doing jscript for kde.

Lars

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