Re: [web-annotation] The textDirection and processingLanguage properties are not needed

@azaroth42 agreed that "I don't like the way you wrote that" is just 
not helpful at this stage.

I believe the larger problem is one of not just "not needed", but 
rather, as this thread has uncovered: unproven, untested, and likely 
insufficient. A broken feature is typically worse than none.

Since apparently no other JSON-based spec uses such an approach 
(sideband properties per text property), textDirection and 
processingLanguage are a first time "hypothetical" and definitely 
aspirational proposal themselves.

I'm worried that they will give the appearance of satisfying i18n 
requirements, when in practice they won't (we don't know, and the 
burden of proof is on prototyping/implementability/usability, not on 
the absence thereof), and that will put us a worse position (broken 
features, backcompat headaches) than if they were absent.

Aside: In general W3C work (web platform in particular) is frowning on
 anything aspirational being REC-track at this point. Not completely 
consistently across W3C yet, but more and more, and this (Annotations)
 may be an instance worth paying attention to in that regard.

A concrete proposal would be drop these two aspirational properties, 
and instead provide a note explaining the limitations (as uncovered by
 i18n folks) in this version of the spec.

Additional optional details: 
* instead of textDirection, implementations should use Unicode 
directional control chars if present, otherwise use the "first strong"
 etc. algorithms described by the i18n folks.
* instead of processingLanguage, implementations should use the HTTP 
Content-Language returned on the resource as a base

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Received on Thursday, 4 August 2016 18:12:51 UTC