In the list of stars on the right-hand side of the chat room, the fairly recent posts are listed as having been posted "- 2d ago" (=two days ago) or "- 15m ago" (=fifteen minutes ago).
In my browser (Firefox 14.0.1 for Ubuntu), at least, the initial "- 1" or "- 15", if it appears after a right-to-left quotation of a chat post, also appears right-to-left, thus showing up on the left side of the text of the chat post.
I can think of two ways to fix this:
- Add
lang='en' dir='ltr'
to the<html>
tag. Then, the Unicode bidirectional algorithm should interpret the (directionally neutral) hyphen-space-numeral as left-to-right. (Because it's between a right-to-left and a left-to-right character, it follows the ambient direction.) - Add a left-to-right mark (U+200E) immediately before the "- 1" (before the hyphen), forcing the hyphen-space-numeral to be between two left-to-right characters and thus left-to-right.
The latter seems a surer bet (viz, that it will work in more browsers) to me.
:-)
– msh210♦ Aug 1 '12 at 18:59