[HTML5] i18n comment 1: Rendering bidi without a style sheet

Comment from the i18n review of:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

Comment 1
At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0802-html5/
Editorial/substantive: S
Tracked by: RI

Location in reviewed document:
3.4.4 [http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#the-dir]

Comment:
\"The processing of this attribute depends on the presentation layer. For example, CSS 2.1 defines a mapping from this attribute to the CSS \'direction\' and \'unicode-bidi\' properties, and defines rendering in terms of those properties.\"


We think that HTML 5, like HTML 4, should be able to render bidirectional text without a style sheet. It would break backwards compatibility to remove the ability of a browser to do so without CSS. Therefore in our opinion, HTML 5 has to describe the expected behavior in at least the detail of HTML 4 rather than leave it up to the \"presentation layer\".


Note that we do not want to impose a requirement on implementations of HTML 5 to implement CSS, but you could describe the expected behaviour by just referencing CSS and defining a default stylesheet fragment. This would just mean that an HTML 5 implementation has to make things behave as if it used this CSS default stylesheet fragment

Received on Friday, 29 February 2008 16:10:37 UTC