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Comment by morbicer | Hacker News Reader

I would like to hear from East Asian people if this is something they find useful.

After 30ish years of internet without it I would assume they got used to LTR.

It feels like this would cause a lot of bugs because devs aren't prepared to handle vertical correctly.

Vertical can be nice for poetry or prose but forms? I believe in Japan/China/Korea most signs, subtitles etc are LTR. Mongolian script is something else but it feels like bringing an antique custom to forcefully override some past Russian and Chinese imperial impact.

I really don't want to sound ignorant or xenophobic and would like to hear from someone native to this.

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They use of horizontal layout is to some extent a chicken and egg problem, since support for vertical writing has been poor in many web browsers.

Vertical writing is often used in books, however, including ePub books that are internally HTML. With good enough support, it would be pretty reasonable to do a vertical layout for a serious news site, and horizontal form controls in the middle of that would likely be out of place. Physical newspapers, magazines, books, and manga in Japan are predominantly vertical.

In case anyone is wondering about Mongolian script, here's a good example: https://president.mn/mng/

> past Russian ... imperial impact

Not sure how "past Russian impact" is at all related to ttb writings ...

Could you elaborate on that?

I am not an expert but Mongolia was under heavy Soviet influence so they adopted Cyrillic alphabet

After USSR dissolution there's an impulse to return to the traditional vertical script which is a bit impractical because compared to say Han it's not possible to write it horizontally.

Wiki can tell it better than me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolian_Cyrillic_alphabet

USSR !== Russian Empire.

Anyway...

Vertical writings are fading out not because someone's political will, but because of their impracticability in modern era.

First commercial typewriter appeared in US in 1874 and it effectively set the end for any non-LTR writing system.

In that respect, can we attach USA to that imperial club that killed TTB writing systems?

USSR is Russia's most successful imperial project. Let's not pretend it was Estonians and Tajiks who ran the business.

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