Re: [css-writing-modes] Does not mention "auto" for the "direction" property

On 2016/09/27 11:35, fantasai wrote:
> On 09/26/2016 03:22 AM, Martin J. Dürst wrote:
>>
>> 1) Arabic or hebrew script displayed with a font that uses equivalent
>> Latin glyphs, and for which the direction has to be
>> fixed because RTL Latin doesn't make sense.
>
> I think at this point your document is in fact a transcription and
> should be encoded as such. :)
> We have the -Latn subtag for a reason.

Well, if I'm not good at reading Arabic or Hebrew, I might make this up 
as a user stylesheet. Or I might offer this from the server without 
wanting to create multiple documents.

>> 2) XML or XML-like documents where direction is given by an attribute,
>> but this attribute (or attributes) are not named "dir",
>> and/or their values are not named "rtl", "ltr",...
>>
>> 3) XML or XML-like documents where certain fields (appearing scattered
>> throughout the document) are RTL by default or by
>> definition, and where adding a dir='rtl' attribute on each of them
>> would be overkill.
>>
>> So the summary is "You shouldn't use this unless you're an UA or
>> you're really exactly sure of what you're doing."
>
> These are both cases where you're pretending to be a UA, effectively,
> by interpreting the markup yourself where the UA is lacking.

Yes, because the UA cannot know any and all kinds of markup in advance.

> Under no circumstances do these situations apply to HTML documents,
> which have their own 'dir' attribute for which UAs already have support.

For 2) and 3), I agree. But is CSS these days limited to HTML?

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 27 September 2016 03:06:59 UTC