LiveJournal Development

i'm thinking this should be aimed at bradfitz, but if it concerns anyone else, then thats great too. I'm not sure if it's just my encoding settings or what, but on http://www.livejournal.com/setlang.bml, the hebrew characters show up but the japaneses characters don't. I'm not sure if anyone has brought this up before, but I figured it might be a good idea. If i'm an idiot for posting this entry, i know i can count on everyone to let me know.

-bobert

While we're pointing out flaws (real or perceived) in LJ's internationalization...

What about languages that are written from right-to-left, like Hebrew? It looks like LJ forces reading order to LTR no matter what, not to mention the Dystopia layout is not friendly to being flipped to RTL (not to mention the triangles on the main page point in the wrong direction). As far as the server informing the browser of reading order goes, is it assumed that all users who speak such languages will have their browser defaulting to RTL and so it's not necessary, or what?

...Or has this been addressed already?

(And should I have posted this in lj_translate?)

Who is it that made this uh.. wonderful little icon.. that now graces the top of every dystopia page? Who on earth unleashed a thing of such great ugliness? It was a good attempt, but it doesn't do justice to the cause, and really just ruins the whole top corner of the page. Why isn't it just a text link in the first place? Or a little bit of small text, and possibly a small language-related icon, something that maybe looked like a link or a button rather than a pretty picture? In terms of good interface, it's just not communicating "click me" or "change your language here."

Does somebody need to make something for you guys? I know I can do that. From just looking at it I'm very sure it was one of you guys (geeks :p) who made it... heh.