Today I was really excited to have the possibility to meet a guy from the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium). His name was Richard Ishida and he is leading the Internationalization Team at the W3C. He is working on a solution that makes vertical text layouts possible on the web, while taking care of the specialities of the Japanese language.
The only information I had before I went to my university to see him was, that it will be about Japan and Layout. So, for me as a guy who knows totally nothing about the Japanese culture and their language, it was so exciting to see and hear what it was all about.
I am sure that some of you know much more about Japan and Japanese but I want to sum up what he was talking about:
First: The Japanese Language is spoken by over 130 million people and consists of over 2000 ideographic characters from Chinese (called Kanji) and other languages. Hiragana, Katakana, Ideographic and Latin characters are mixed; this results in a huge amount of individual characters at all.
Second: The characters fit into a squared box therefore the width and height of each character is equal. In contrast to German Typography and Layout, where you define the margins first and the text has align with the borders and break inside words, it is different in Japanese Layout. The Kihan Hanmen defines how many characters should fit on the page. Due to the monospaced characters and their equal size it is easy to calculate the size of it and though the margings follow. Difficulties arrive when Latin characters and annotations (phonetic and semantic hints) are added which do not fit into the squares.
Third: Maybe the most significant difference is that it is common to set the characters in vertical columns, top to bottom. Each character has its predefined slot and everything will be justified. The problem: It is not possible to easily rotate the layout from a horizontal one to a vertical one. The glyphs themselves need to be rotated to ensure readability. But (you notice, that there are a lot of exceptions which can be defined in clear rules): Specific characters like commas, periods or parantheses don't need to be rotated.
Besides these points there are a handfull more which are clearly defined by the W3C. The task for them is to offer a standardised possibility to ensure correct layout of Japanese on the Web. The Internet Explorer already supports a CSS tag to display paragraphs vertically but there are a lot of things that do not work as they are supposed to.
For now, Japanese Websites need to be layouted as Western ones because there is no good way to handle it. By the way: imagine a vertical layout where you read from the top to bottom and the website is too long and needs scrollbars. Happy scrolling. For me it was very interesting to take a look abroad.
Image from
[link]If you are interested in the work of the W3C you could check out the Group Note which deals with the classification of characters and all the rules which need to be implemented at
[link] 
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