Implementing Better Source Editing
for Bidirectional XHTML and XML

Martin J. Dürst (duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp)
with Kunihiro Sato

32th Internationalization and Unicode Conference,
September 2008, San Jose, CA, USA

This talk and related material is available at:
http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2008/pub/IUC32-bidi

AGU

© 2005-8 Martin J. Dürst Aoyama Gakuin University

What's Your Background?

The Problem

HTML and XML source is easily readable:

<p>Welcome <img scr='fuji.jpg'
   alt="Mt. Fuji"> to Japan!</p>

HTML and XML source with Arabic or Hebrew gets garbled:

<p>ابةتث <img scr='foo.jpg'
   alt=" جحخد"> ذرزسش!</p>
<p>אבגד  <img scr='foo.jpg'
   alt="הוזח"> טיךכ!</p>

The Reason

Potential 'Solutions'

The Real Soultion

Implementation Options

Why Javascript?

Demo: Current Application Structure

http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp/2008/pub/IUC32-bidi/bidi-source.html

Limitations

Tested with

(all on a Japanese Windows XP with SP 3)

How it Works

HTML/XML source treated as simple data

Marked up again for coloring and bidi corrections

Whenever source changes:

Strengthening Syntax Characters

Show Marks

Warn about Controls

HTML Embeddings and Overrrides

Next Steps

Exploring

Conclusions

Please test prototype and provide feedback!