[Bug 16456] direction property should support auto as a value

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=16456

--- Comment #6 from fantasai <fantasai.bugs@inkedblade.net> 2012-03-29 21:51:15 UTC ---
The fact that bidi can be controlled via CSS is a glitch in the way CSS was
defined, and it's a result of people in the past wanting to apply bidi controls
to arbitrary XML. They should have defined an xml:dir attribute instead.

CSS is for styling, not for defining content. A document should still be
understandable if the CSS is turned off, if viewed in a browser that supports
HTML but not CSS. By shifting bidi controls into the CSS layer, you lose
ordering information that is critical for presenting the text, without which
the text itself can be garbled inasmuch as as applying the wrong encoding.

Furthermore, bidi is based on the content, not on the styling intent. If you
change the content, the directionality controls need to be updated to match. If
you change the styling... the directionality controls need to stay the same. No
matter how much you change the styling, the bidi controls always stay the same.
But if you change the content, the bidi code might need to change. They are
tied to, and therefore belong with, the content, not with the style.

Now, selectors are a very convenient way of tying properties to elements. But
the scope of CSS is defined by the scope of styling, not by the scope of
things-that-are-conveniently-applied-with-selectors. Otherwise we'd allow
binding event handlers in CSS, which would also be conveniently applied with
selectors. It might be convenient to bind bidi controls to elements via
selectors. But it is not an argument for them belonging in CSS.

> But unicode-bidi: isolate and unicode-bidi: plaintext are as semantically
> important as dir=ltr or dir=rtl.

"unicode-bidi: isolate" does not confer semantics any more than "display:
table" does. The semantics are conferred by HTML. The CSS values are only
provided so that the HTML definitions can be reflected in the CSS rendering
model. The features provided by 'unicode-bidi: isolate' and 'unicode-bidi:
plaintext' are important, yes, but that's why the HTML spec has <bdi> and <pre
dir=auto>.

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Received on Thursday, 29 March 2012 21:51:20 UTC