Re: Alignment of paragraphs with unicode-bidi: plaintext

I can see arguments for either approach being better. On the one hand, text
is more readable aligned to its own start side. On the other hand,
 paragraphs with alternating alignment, especially when many are less than
half a line long, can look "jagged", and in extreme cases can result in the
user not even noticing the paragraphs aligned to the minority side.

Furthermore, we would need to specify how allowing plaintext to base
alignment on paragraph direction would play with text-align. Is it supposed
to be limited to "text-align:start" and "text-align:end"?

I would very much like to hear what people think about this.

Aharon

On Sun, Oct 30, 2011 at 1:28 PM, Simon Montagu <smontagu@smontagu.org>wrote:

> As far as I can see, there is no explicit specification in CSS Writing
> Modes Module Level 3 of what effect "unicode-bidi: plaintext" should have
> on the default alignment of paragraphs.
>
> When implementing "unicode-bidi: plaintext" for Gecko, I took it for
> granted that each paragraph in the element would determine its
> directionality by the heuristic in the UBA, and then determine the start of
> the line box depending on the directionality of the paragraph.
>
> I just noticed that recent versions of Chrome behave differently:
> directionality is determined for each paragraph separately, but alignment
> is determined by the first paragraph in the element, and all subsequent
> paragraphs get the same alignment.
>
> As I said, there doesn't seem to be anything in the spec to say which
> approach is correct. I think the behaviour in Gecko is more intuitive and
> useful, but then I would, wouldn't I? Either way, it is probably worth
> adding something to the spec to make it explicit.
>
>
>