[Bug 10807] i18n comment 1 : new attribute: ubi

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10807

--- Comment #22 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 2010-11-02 19:40:41 UTC ---
In general, it seems like a <bdi> element is the way to go.

However, I think it would also make sense to make sure that <output> elements
are always isolated (this is already in the spec), and also that any element
which has a lang="" attribute (regardless of value) should have this isolation
behaviour. I'll leave the issue of the automatic direction determination to the
other bug.

So for a place name, you'd write:

   <output>Purple Pizza</output> - <a href="ppreviews.html">3 reviews</a>

If you knew the direction, e.g. a phone number, you could write:

   <bdi dir=ltr>+1 555 123 4567</bdi>

Comment 21's example would be marked up as:

   "<bdi>abc</bdi>", "<bdi>def GHI</bdi>", "<bdi>KJL mnoM/bdi>"

...or maybe:

   "<span lang="">abc</span>", "<span lang="">def GHI</span>", "<span
lang="">KJL mnoM/span>"


(In reply to comment #19)
> 
> Most, but not all. Phone numbers, urls, file sizes, etc. usually need isolation
> in an RTL document, but are not in any particular language.

Fair enough.


> I would hate to make it dependent on the lang attribute, for the reason given
> above, but also because the exact language of the data is very rarely known.

If it's not known, then you should be setting lang="" (empty), so that's ok.

> Also, it is possible that adding isolation by default would break existing
> documents. This is also the argument against doing isolation by default any
> time the dir attribute is set.

How could it break an existing document? Might it not fix as many if not more
documents than it breaks?

Indeed, doing this automatically any time dir="" is explicitly set might not be
a bad idea either... do we have any data on how many pages would change
rendering if we did this? Might this not actually make more sense overall?

I'm very much of the opinion that we should make this work as automatically as
possible, because there's no way most authors are going to learn or understand
this stuff.

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Received on Tuesday, 2 November 2010 19:40:44 UTC