Tangentially, for those doing web development, CSS has a bunch of "logical" properties [1] that adapt to the locale of the user agent. For example, you can swap out `margin-left` and `margin-bottom` in your CSS with `margin-inline-start` and `margin-block-end` respectively. Similarly, `text-align` accepts start/end instead of left/right. Even if you're not targetting right-to-left or top-to-bottom locales, it's easy enough to switch to logical properties and get most of the work out of the way if you change your mind in the future.
Do "top-to-bottom locales" exist? Has anyone built a site with users that get utility out of these?
I've usually found that the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of. I suspect their popularity is owed to tutorial authors showing off their CSS prowess.
(I'm also not convinced of the need to flip sizing values for RTL/LTR, but that's at least useful)
Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Vietnamese originally, but computers have made horizontal writing more common on the internet. Modern Vietnamese is also written in a variation of the Latin script, of course.
Mongolian still uses the vertical Mongolian script, though Cyrillic script m has also been introduced in Mongolia during Soviet times and seems to be common inside Mongolia. However, the Mongolian government seems to be moving back to using the original Mongolian script. Furthermore, the Mongolian people inside China never took up the Cyrillic writing system.
Google uses the Mongolian Cyrillic alphabet (https://www.google.com/?hl=mn) so even companies that seem to have a page in every single language don't seem to bother with supporting the original script. This is probably because the Mongolian speakers inside China can't make much use of Google anyway.
Funnily enough, Mongolian is one of the few known scripts not only written vertically but also left to right, unlike other Asian vertical scripts (which go right to left).
Yes! The website of the president of Mongolia has three versions, including one with the traditional top-to-bottom script. It's quite well-designed! You can see web-design features that make sense for this script: the nav-bar being on the left, left-to-right scrolling, and pagination at the right end.
That site is well made. This is a bit pedantic, but if the default for that site is horizontal text, I'm not sure I would call this a "top-to-bottom locale": https://president.mn/
I’m somewhat surprised to see that some of the characters are not being correctly displayed in iOS Safari. I was expecting the symbols common enough to be used on an official page of a head of state to be common enough for inclusion in the Unicode standard. Or is it a font issue?
They should make people turn their monitors vertically oriented --are monitors in MN usually in "portrait" or do they maintain a discrepancy of vertical text but horizontal layout?
I think it's ok to have horizontal monitors even for "top-to-bottom" scripts. That's simply because it's less taxing for us to use. Plus, mouse scrollwheels work just as well so it's not problem to navigate.
Go to any random bookstore in Taiwan and pick up a book in traditional Chinese. It's top-to-bottom, and right-to-left. The spine of the book is flipped compared with western books: it's on the right side when the cover is facing up.
But, there are still texts that are read top to bottom. I only know that because my daughter has a Japanese friend and she has shown me some of her books and how they are read top to bottom.
I'd say it's YAGNI if it required going out of your way to add something on top of your project. CSS logical properties mirror traditional properties one-for-one. Once you know about them why would you go back to older layout properties? The need to support different locales is really a question of what product you're building or audiences your targeting. e-commerce, news sites, social networks... they seem like good use cases for making the switch and future proofing a little.
I love supporting different locales, and have shipped sites for multiple continents. I don't know if your locale in question exists.
Forget my question on your users getting utility out of this. Have you ever seen a site, any site, that supports switching to top-to-bottom writing? Against what future are we proofing – a new language arising?
We're looking for vertical to horizontal switching. Not just examples of vertical writing.
Almost all extant vertically-written languages are more commonly seen horizontally on the web. Vertical Japanese on the web (from my American understanding) is a design choice, and is notably absent from mainstays like https://www.yahoo.co.jp/
That is to say, it is unlikely that a site's language switcher would opt for top-to-bottom writing.
Edit: the Mongolian president's site does have an English version! ...but it's a completely different site :( https://president.mn/en/. Still, this is the closest to a use case for logical properties I've seen, so kudos.
It's unlikely (I'd guess) that a site would want to offer the exact same page in both horizontal and vertical modes, yes. But it's plausible they might want to share a lot of design elements between horizontal and vertical versions of the content.
Using logical properties would make it easier to have a common base of CSS that controls spacing, sizes, etc., that can be used by both language versions, rather than maintaining them completely separately.
> the arguments for these properties revolve around, "well, what if I decide to use traditional Mongolian in the future?," which seems like the biggest case of YAGNI I can think of
...And even this one close example doesn't use them!
[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_Logical...