Re: Proposal for new direction attribute

On 02/19/2013 11:24 PM, Richard Ishida wrote:
> Unicode 6.3 will shortly be released, and will contain new control codes (RLI, LRI, FSI, PDI) to enable authors to express
> isolation at the same time as direction in inline bidirectional text. The Unicode Consortium recommends that isolation be used
> as the default for all future inline bidirectional text embeddings.
>
> The i18n WG has been discussing how to ensure that HTML5 encourages and enables content authors to adopt and apply isolation
> *as the default* whenever they set direction on inline content, and discourage future use of dir=rtl or dir=ltr (which does
> not produce isolation).
>
> The proposal of the WG, with rationales, can be found at http://www.w3.org/International/wiki/Html-bidi-isolation

My concern here is that 'direction' is much longer to type than 'dir'.
This makes it both less convenient when authoring, and also a consideration
for page size. I'm not convinced this is the best way forward if you want
people to use isolation more, or even use direction-setting consistently.
I think it's easier to understand and more straightforward to go with the
rli/lri option. It's weird to have some bidi options on 'dir' and others
on 'direction'.

The main disadvantage with rli/lri IMO is making sure the appropriate CSS
is set for back-compat. But for cases where back-compat is a concern, *and*
embeddings are sufficient to solve them (like, they won't work for cases
that currently require RLM/LRM), the <bdi> element can be used.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 20 February 2013 18:22:04 UTC