Good news!

Some of us use bidirectional scripts. Which can be a problem.

Mozilla (which see) is the open source upcoming version of Netscape's browser. From near the start, i18n was taken very seriously. And as of last week, all Mozilla builds support bidirectional text.

In other words, Hebrew works! (Arabic and Persian might also, but I've not tested this).

Historically, Internet Explorer has had much better support for Hebrew than Netscape Navigator. Netscape only supported so-called "visual Hebrew" encoding; "logical Hebrew" (essentially Unicode) is the sane standard, but only IE users could view it.

Until now. Because Mozilla 0.9+ (my version is Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux 2.2.13 i686; en-US; rv:0.9+) Gecko/20010510) displays "logical Hebrew" extremely well. So standardly, in fact, that it correctly renders text like "100-200". This is unfortunate, as IE fails to do this correctly, and websites compensate for IE. The end result, of course, is that Mozilla displays it backwards. But I digress. And, if you look carefully, you'll see I'm running Mozilla on a UN*X box. This is the first browser to correctly display Hebrew on UN*X.

Work on the (now merged!) BiDi branch was performed not just by Netscape workers; in a show of how open source development can take place, IBM (at Egypt and Israel) contributed people who worked with Netscape's people!

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