Categories
Software and Programming

Mozilla Bidi Code shows up

IBM’s Mozilla BiDi team have posted their first code contributions
sometime on Monday, but I only caught up on the newsgroup today.
(Some weblogger I am…)

There’s a patch on this page:
http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24199
And also a post on the newsgroup (netscape.public.mozilla.i18n).

Mostly, it’s not that interesting, just code to switch the scrollbars on the windows, and a begining of setting up Bidi preferences. The interesting stuff will be an actual bidi rendering engine fiddling with layout. Still, it’s a good excuse to download and recompile Mozilla again (and also to try out my new PC at work…)

Other notable news of the month (duh) is that http://sf-f.org.il is now online with it’s new, Moose / slashdot style interface.

And I spent last weekend getting a cramp in my neck and overhauling the look of the ArmageddonCon site. I was pleased with it Saturday night, and I’m finding more and more flaws as the week shambles along…

I had a dream I was fired and lost my e-mail, which was the most painful aspect of it. I wonder if dotan@softlinkusa.com is still there or not? (It must be, I’m still getting the weekly WebReview mailing; their only “how to unsubscribe” instructions point me to a long-defunct Netscape “Inbox Direct” account…

Thank god for corky.net

P.S: In case anyone is actually reading this (ha!), Bidi is short for Bi-Directional, i.e. writing that contains both Hebrew (or Arabic) sequences, read from right to left, and Latin sequences (English, numbers, whatever), read from left to right. Supporting Bidi properly in any application (especially if you’ve only got one application, not a whole OS + Office suite) is very non-trivial.