I've managed to get Eclipse to write backwards before and could never figure out why... this might explain it :p

Doesn't work in Firefox 3; it's still pretty cool.

From the comments on Reddit, there are many unicode characters that have the RTL control character. http://www.microsoft.com/middleeast/msdn/Control.aspx

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't understand Unicode and doesn't understand how to code in such a way that I avoid discriminating against people who happened to not be born in a country where a language with a Latin alphabet is used.

‫‬‭‮‪‫‬‭‮҉( cool

it's probably from a bidirectional or right-to-left character set. some languages go from right-to-left, but (incredibly) some can go in both directions, depending on the context.

A google search on this give over 250K results!

news.yc doesn't work with unicode..

Neither does Ruby on Rails.

Define 'works'. If you mean it's not perfect, then I agree. But it's still VERY possible to build websites in Rails that support unicode all the way down.

Uhm... ever heard of Multibyte?!

Heck, our whole RoR based app is localized in 7 different languages.