- From: Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>
- Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 03:34:58 -0700
- To: Robert Burns <rob@robburns.com>
- Cc: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>, public-html@w3.org
On Aug 2, 2007, at 12:56 AM, Robert Burns wrote: > > BTW, can you provide a use-case for setting @dir to the opposite > value to what a particular script would usually have (i.e., setting > @dir to 'ltr' for Arabic or Hebrew or 'rtl' for Latin or Cyrillic or > the like). I cannot think of any use-case myself. > I can't personally read any RTL scripts, so I can't tell you all the details offhand. But things can get complicated when mixing multiple scripts, and I imagine it is often useful to control neutral text directionality separately. Here is a quick survey I did of a tiny handful of sites in Hebrew, Arabic and Farsi: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/arabic/news/ - does not use the dir attribute at all, so it currently gets the default of ltr http://persianblog.com/home.php - does not use the dir attribute at all, so it currently gets the default of ltr http://www.google.co.il/ - explicitly sets dir=ltr around a div that contains hebrew text http://www.walla.co.il/ - does not use dir attribute at all, but sets both "direction: ltr" and "direction: rtl" via CSS for different elements These are some of the top sites in their respective languages, so it's pretty clear to me that for compatibility with web content, lang and dir must remain independent. Regards, Maciej
Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 10:35:10 UTC