Re: [SVGMobile12] Lack of BIDI 'direction' (ISSUE-2058)

Erik Dahlström wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:21:35 +0100, fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
>> Doug Schepers wrote:
>>> fantasai wrote (on 10/28/08 7:10 PM):
>>>> Doug Schepers wrote:
>>>>> http://dev.w3.org/SVG/profiles/1.2T/publish/text.html#DirectionProperty
>>>>   # For the 'direction' property to have any effect, the 'unicode-bidi'
>>>>   # property's value must be embed or bidi-override.
>>>>
>>>> This is false. As I explained before, the 'direction' property alone has an
>>>> effect when set at the paragraph level ("paragraph" being the unit of text
>>>> the bidi algorithm operates on).
> 
> I'm guessing this wording was the SVG translation of the following sentence in CSS:
> "For the 'direction' property to have any effect on inline-level elements, the
> 'unicode-bidi' property's value must be 'embed' or 'override'."
> 
> So the question then becomes: what is an "inline-level element" in terms of svg?
> 
> I'm thinking that this might be the 'tspan' element, since that cannot start a
> text content block by itself. The 'tspan' element always needs to be enclosed
> in a 'text content block element'. 
> 
>> I suggest removing the text. The first quoted sentence is very clearly wrong.
> 
> Is the corresponding sentence in CSS also wrong?

The corresponding sentence in CSS is qualified as describing only
inline elements, which are effectively invisible to the bidi
algorithm unless 'unicode-bidi' is set.

The same might be true of tspan elements *if* they are *never*
responsible for bounding the bidi algorithm's paragraph (i.e. never
form a "text chunk" in SVG terms). I don't know enough about SVG's
text model to say if that is true. But 'direction' also applies to
<text> elements (or should) so even if tspan elements are the
equivalent of CSS's inline elements, then you'd need to qualify the
statement to describe only them.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 29 October 2008 16:49:28 UTC