Requests for comment/Vertical writing support

Vertical writing support in Mediawiki is necessary in order to have wikis in vertically written languages, such as American Sign Language and Mongolian. Vertical text is currently supported by Internet Explorer 8+ (with partial support in 5.5-7 ), Google Chrome, Safari, and Opera 15, but is not yet supported by Mozilla Firefox (Mozilla bug 145503). Vertical text uses the CSS  property; see the W3C CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3.

In order to support vertical writing, there would need to be a way to automatically rotate the CSS, much like the CSS is flipped horizontally for right-to-left languages. Currently, the ResourceLoader uses CSSJanus to flip the CSS. There is an extended version of CSSJanus called CSS::Yamaantaka that is capable of converting CSS from horizontal writing directions to vertical.

Additionally, there would need to be a way to rotate certain Mediawiki images (arrows, bars, etc.), presumably automatically. Certain scripts would need to be modified to comply with the page direction as well. (Width needs to become height, top to become left, left to top, etc.)

There are approximately seventy million people whose native language is a sign language, as well as several million users of Mongolian script, who would benefit from vertical writing support in Mediawiki. Vertical text may also be useful as an option for the Classical Chinese localization. Creation of an ASL Wikipedia is currently blocked by lack of vertical writing support.