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Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

mough.xyz

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Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#91

Post by jholman »

groby_b wrote: post #34
scrozier wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of gatekeeping "the space" with insider abbreviations and belittling the author, you could appreciate that they raised awareness of the issue.

I am not "gatekeeping", I'm telling you that in spaces you don't know there's hidden complexity, and you shouldn't rely on the Internet. No amount of "awareness" is taking that away. Also, please tell me where I "belittled" the author.

Yeah, I agree (with you) that your top-level comment is very very correct, and contributes a fantastic point.

And I agree (with some commenters) that the "Uh" makes it look way worse than it would otherwise. :) I learned something from both your comment and from the criticisms. Yay.

--

Though I think "you shouldn't rely on the Internet" is not quite summarizing it exactly correctly (not a complaint about the original comment, just trying to improve on the summary). It's not "relying on the internet" that's the problem, it's some weird conjunction of a few things that are each fine. I will try to expand, fumblingly.

(1) Obviously you could have a conversation with an expert-in-the-space over the internet, so clearly it's not the internet that's the problem. (2) Obviously you can get good results off Google, for example by googling "textarea bidi", so it's not Google that's the problem. And, heck it, compared to not having an internet to search, the internet does a lot to reveal the hidden complexity that we wouldn't otherwise even be aware of.

So we could propose that the problem is non-experts doing things (i.e. we could encourage gatekeeping), but wait, that's not right either, because that would imply that Mo shouldn't have created Standard Notes until they were an expert in all relevant things (which turns out to include something something multilingual something), and clearly if Standard Notes wasn't delivering great value without that expertise, then they wouldn't be getting "requests to add right to left language support". So obviously Mo had more than enough expertise to do what they did.

I dunno. I dunno what the pithy version of the takeaway could be. We might just have to settle with the longer version from your original comment.

"[Neither you, nor google, knows] what you don't know. ... So, if you can, ask people, not software. Especially if you don't know the space."

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#92

Post by crazygringo »

reaperducer wrote: post #90
crazygringo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it also wouldn't make sense for Office to have different dictionaries between its Mac and PC (and web) versions. So one or the other has got to give. Users want OS's to be consistent across apps, but users also want apps to be consistent across OS's. And so the reality is each feature is going to be decided on a case by case basis and the end result will be somewhere in the middle.

it also wouldn't make sense for Office to have different dictionaries between its Mac and PC (and web) versions. Why? 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else. If Office used the system dictionary, then people's added words would exist in every application they use, and not just every application exc…

> 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer.

That's not even close to true.

A lot of people use a company PC to work at the office, and a Mac laptop at home. Or vice-versa. And they make edits on their iPhone. Or Android. Or iPad. Or Surface. Some of these use an installed version, and some of them use a web version.

People today absolutely do not stick to one device, or even one operating system.

To be honest, the idea of a system dictionary that is tied to a single device doesn't make much sense in today's world. The Mac dictionary doesn't even get synced to other devices logged in with the same Apple ID!

And the Microsoft Word spellcheck feature predates the macOS one by many years.

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#94

Post by okanat »

reaperducer wrote: post #90
crazygringo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, it also wouldn't make sense for Office to have different dictionaries between its Mac and PC (and web) versions. So one or the other has got to give. Users want OS's to be consistent across apps, but users also want apps to be consistent across OS's. And so the reality is each feature is going to be decided on a case by case basis and the end result will be somewhere in the middle.

it also wouldn't make sense for Office to have different dictionaries between its Mac and PC (and web) versions. Why? 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else. If Office used the system dictionary, then people's added words would exist in every application they use, and not just every application exc…

> 99.9% of people using Microsoft Office are using it on one computer. I'd wager the majority of those people aren't using only Microsoft Office and nothing else.

If you step outside the tech bubble, yoı'll see Microsoft Office is actually used to do, you know, office work quite extensively. If you work in a big enough company, it is probably an Excel file transferred from your company to the bank that paid your salary. This is its major purpose and where it is being used predominantly. As you can guess, those files are being shared accross computers that run completely different OSes.

Word is a word processing program. Its job is provide a consistent experience in paper-form document generation. Its job is to be useful and consistent regardless of the underlying system. It gives you suggestions based on its own dictionary that has extra metadata. I doubt that your system has the exact metadata it has.

It could be a reasonable ask to support injecting words from the system user dictionary but those are rarely the formal words one would use regularly in Word.

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#96

Post by qingcharles »

miduil wrote: post #8

There is also this shortcut of ctrl+shift+x to switch to RTL. Which is really funny when you do it on Twitter since it flips the entire user interface.

Twitter is one of the few that does RTL properly.

RTL has really bad support on the web, and RTL folks are constantly having to input into and read RTL text in interfaces designed for LTR which makes things really awkward to read.

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#98

Post by bjoli »

I find it rather baffling that people don't seem to spend any time reading specs. I haven't done anything even remotely serious in HTML since about 2003, and I know about (and have used) the dir attribute.

it is one of maybe 12 global non-event attributes.

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#99

Post by deskamess »

JadeNB wrote: post #87
rendall wrote: post #85

> The first results page of Google never lies... I have something to tell you that will help you solve your problem, but you should sit down first, because it's probably going to make you sad...

> I have something to tell you that will help you solve your problem, but you should sit down first, because it's probably going to make you sad... I think you are responding to this sentence read literally: > The first results page of Google never lies, so I thought this was just inherently a problem that required direct intervention, and so was never quite able to prioritize it (so much for my moral high ground). b…

> Google has been lying to us about RTL support in inputs.

Whatever the users of the internet prioritized as important showed up first. There is no lying. Google search results and now ChatGPT/AI responses are pretty much a reflection of the information base provided to it. Biases, inaccuracies, et al. Its a weighted mirror on humanity (where some cultures/languages/regions have contributed more data and hence have a higher weight - like English speaking corpus).

Re: Add dir=“auto” to your inputs and textareas

#100

Post by JadeNB »

deskamess wrote: post #99
JadeNB wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have something to tell you that will help you solve your problem, but you should sit down first, because it's probably going to make you sad... I think you are responding to this sentence read literally: > The first results page of Google never lies, so I thought this was just inherently a problem that required direct intervention, and so was never quite able to prioritize it (so much for my moral high ground). b…

> Google has been lying to us about RTL support in inputs. Whatever the users of the internet prioritized as important showed up first. There is no lying. Google search results and now ChatGPT/AI responses are pretty much a reflection of the information base provided to it. Biases, inaccuracies, et al. Its a weighted mirror on humanity (where some cultures/languages/regions have contributed more data and hence have a…

> Whatever the users of the internet prioritized as important showed up first. There is no lying. Google search results and now ChatGPT/AI responses are pretty much a reflection of the information base provided to it. Biases, inaccuracies, et al. Its a weighted mirror on humanity (where some cultures/languages/regions have contributed more data and hence have a higher weight - like English speaking corpus).

It is certainly reasonable to argue about whether "lying" requires intent, but I think that it is usually agreed that "lying" in this context means "presenting false information without indicating that it is false."

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