Re: [css3-writing-modes] [CSS21] bidi of replaced inline elements

> With regards to replaced elements and their bidi behavior, there are
> two cases to consider:
>  - what happens when the image falls back to its alt text
>  - what happens if the image is intended to represent a character
>    (that is not otherwise encoded or representable)

> In the first case, the element's effect on its surrounding text
> should be no different whether it is rendered as replaced or as
> text. In this case, we should be treating it as you say -- by
> handling it with the appropriate embedding codes.

I would argue that in this case, whether rendered or replaced, the best
effect to have on the surrounding is no effect at all, i.e. the effect of a
neutral character (or if you prefer to think of it that way,
unicode-bidi:isolate).

> In the second case, the author might want to control the element's
> effective directionality. In which case that approach won't work,
> and we need to replace the character with a pretend character as
> currently specified in the text.

I think it's a rare case, which can be handled by either putting the element
in a span with the desired direction or surrounding it with either LRMs or
RLMs.

So our options here are
 a) Take approach 1 (change the specs to use embedding codes)
 b) Take approach 2 (no change)
 c) Take approach 1 for 'embed' and approach 2 for 'bidi-override'

I want d): non-textual elements are always treated as a neutral character
regardless of their unicode-bidi value.

As I said in another post, this is the browsers' current behavior. Changing
it would create backward compatibility problems, since authors may have
assigned a dir to non-textual elements in order to have their alt or title
text displayed correctly, and this dir could now affect the ordering outside
the element.

Received on Thursday, 26 May 2011 09:28:16 UTC