[Bug 10820] i18n comment 16 : option element should support text-align CSS property and be displayed accordingly both in the dropdown and after being chosen

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10820

Aharon Lanin <aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
                 CC|                            |aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.co
                   |                            |m
         Resolution|FIXED                       |

--- Comment #4 from Aharon Lanin <aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.com> 2010-10-13 22:20:22 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #2)
> Checked in as WHATWG revision r5589.
> Check-in comment: Add a note about keeping the alignment right for <select>
> http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker?from=5588&to=5589

The revision is problematic. It adds:

<p>User agents are expected to consistently render the labels in a
<code>select</code>, in particular ensuring that any left-to-right or
right-to-left alignment is consistent whether the label is being displayed as
part of the page or in a menu control.</p>

There are several problems:

1. Alignment values include "left" and "right", but not "left-to-right" or
"right-to-left". Those ("ltr" and "rtl") are direction values.

2. The meaning is unclear. "User agents are expected to consistently render the
labels in a <code>select</code>" can be easily misunderstood to mean that some
aspect(s) of rendering, e.g. direction, should be consistent across all the
labels in a select, i.e. all the labels should be aligned according to the
select's alignment value. That was *not* the bug's intent. The consistency that
this bug and bug 10819 demand is in the way a label is displayed before and
after being selected. That is, if a label was displayed in the ltr direction
(e.g. "hello!", not "!hello") before being selected (in the drop-down), it
should still be ltr after being selected - even though the <select> may be rtl
(that's bug 10819). This is currently not always the case in Firefox or Chrome.
And if a label was displayed left-aligned before being selected, it should
still be displayed left-aligned after being selected (that's this bug). This is
currently not always the case in Firefox. It is possible that the revision was
in fact trying for the consistency we hand in mind when it said "whether the
label is being displayed as part of the page or in a menu control", but I am
not sure what "part of the page" and "menu control" mean here.

Now, the bug was also demanding one more thing: that the option element should
support the text-align CSS property. I now see that this demand is
inappropriate for two reasons:

- It is a CSS issue, not HTML.
- It would result in options with different direction in having different
alignment by default. This is neither what most users want nor what browsers
(with the single exception of Firefox) do.

I therefore want to drop that demand. The HTML spec revision that I would
therefore want is:

<p>User agents are expected to render a label in a <code>select</code> with the
same direction and alignment it had before being chosen after it has been
chosen.</p>

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Received on Wednesday, 13 October 2010 22:20:26 UTC