Stan Brown wrote:
Tue, 7 Mar 2006 15:01:57 +0100 from Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri@rrzn-
user.uni-hannover.de>:
Internet Explorer has a menu
View > Encoding > Left-To-Right Document
View > Encoding > Right-to-Left Document
where you can toggle the display between LTR and RTL.
I discovered only now that you can prevent such a switch in IE
when you write <BODY DIR=LTR> or BODY {direction: ltr}.
Question: Why would an author _want_ to "prevent such a switch"?
It may be failure of imagination on my part, but if the user
perversely insists on viewing LTR text as RTL isn't that his choice?
Is it really worth wasting even eight bytes to prevent this?
If I set my default character encoding to ISO-8859-1, it doesn't mean
that if I go to a Hebrew page I want to read the gibberish that would be
created by treating it as ISO-8859-1. It means that I ordinarily read
pages in Western European languages, so if a page were to come through
without an encoding declared, my browser should try ISO-8859-1. If that
doesn't work, *then* I'll tell my browser to try something else.
Likewise, if a user sets his browser to default to RTL, I don't think it
means that he insists on reading LTR documents as RTL, but that he
normally reads pages in an RTL script, and therefore wants pages to
default to RTL if they don't explicitly state a direction. If he comes
across a page in English that doesn't declare a direction, then he'll
switch to LTR for that page.
