[Bug 19887] New: add a "script" or "writing-system" attribute, in addition to "lang"

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=19887

          Priority: P2
            Bug ID: 19887
                CC: mike@w3.org, robin@w3.org
          Assignee: dave.null@w3.org
           Summary: add a "script" or "writing-system" attribute, in
                    addition to "lang"
        QA Contact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
          Severity: normal
    Classification: Unclassified
                OS: Linux
          Reporter: amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il
          Hardware: PC
            Status: NEW
           Version: unspecified
         Component: default
           Product: HTML.next

In HTML it's possible to define lang and dir for every element. It would also
be useful to define the writing system of an element.

The default value for this attribute can be obtained from BCP 47 or CLDR.

Here are several possible use cases:

1. Fine-grained definition of the writing system element in languages that can
be written in several languages. Serbian, for example, can be written in Latin
and in Cyrillic. It's possible to use lang="sr-latn" and lang="sr-cyrl", but
this is not robust enough, because the langauge codes can have other qualifiers
after the dash, such as locale (country), dialect, variant, etc.

2. Using CSS pseudo-selectors to apply a styling rule to all elements in
different languages, but the same writing system. For example, a site may have
content in English, Arabic, Persian, Urdu and other languages in the Arabic
script, and its designer may want to apply a default font to all the content in
the Arabic-script languages. It can be done using :lang(ar), :lang(fa),
:lang(ur) etc., but this doesn't scale, because there dozens of other languages
written in the Arabic script. So, I envision something like :script(arab) to
cover all of them. This can be used for applying fonts, line-height, and any
other styling.

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Received on Wednesday, 7 November 2012 07:57:12 UTC