A Complete Guide to Web Design

462 Chapter 27 – Internationalization

HTML 4.0 Language Tags

Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Edition

Directionality

An internationalized HTML standard would also need to take into account that

many languages read from right to left. Directionality is part of a character’s

encoding within Unicode.

The HTML 4.0 Specification provides the newdirattribute for specifying the

direction in which the text should be interpreted. It can be used in conjunction

with thelangattribute and may be added within the tags of most elements. The

accepted value for direction is eitherltr for left-to-right, or rtlfor right-to-left.

For example, the following code would set a paragraph in Arabic, reading from

right to left:

<P LANG="ar" DIR="rtl">...</P>

There is also a new tag introduced in HTML 4.0 specifically dealing with docu-

ments that contain combinations of left- and right-reading text (bi-directional text,

or Bidi for short). The<bdo>tag is used for “bi-directional override,” in other

words, to specify a span of text that should override the intrinsic direction (as

inherited from Unicode) of the text it contains. The<bdo>tag takes thedir

attribute as follows:

<BDO DIR="ltr">English phrase in an otherwise Hebrew text</BDO>

...

ga Irish no Norwegian uz Uzbek

gd Scots Gaelic

gl Galician oc Occitan vi Vietnamese

gn Guarani om (Afan) Oromo vo Volapuk

gu Gujarati or Oriya

wo Wolof

ha Hausa pa Punjabi

he Hebrew

(formerly iw)

pl Polish xh Xhosa

hi Hindi ps Pashto, Pushto

hr Croatian pt Portuguese yi Yiddish

(formerly ji)

hu Hungarian yo Yoruba

hy Armenian qu Quechua

za Zhuang

rm Rhaeto-

Romance

zh Chinese

zu Zulu

Table 27-1: Code for the Representation of Names of Languages (continued)

Code Country Code Country Code Country