Re: FPWD of Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML

Hi Richard and I18N WG,

On Mar 5, 2010, at 3:29 AM, Richard Ishida wrote:

> HTML folks,
>
> Just to let you know the expectations of the i18n WG wrt this  
> document[1] which was published yesterday.  We do not expect the  
> HTML WG to review and comment on it just yet.
>
> The document is still in early draft, and was published to  
> facilitate ongoing feedback from bidi experts and i18n folks. It  
> also contains some explicitly identified open issues.
>
> The plan is to obtain feedback as soon as possible from bidi experts  
> and internationalization folks, then issue a new draft that  
> incorporates the results of those discussions.  Only at that point  
> do we plan to put the proposals to the HTML community and seek their  
> comments and commitment. Depending on the amount of discussion that  
> takes place, we would hope to publish the second draft in about a  
> month from now.
>
> [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2010/WD-html-bidi-20100304/

It's a little quirky to deliver feedback on the HTML WG's deliverables  
in the form of a Working Draft developed elsewhere, and it might have  
been better to make us more aware of this effort ahead of time. (I,  
for one, was surprised to see  seventh Working Draft published with  
ours and was puzzled that I hadn't seen it before.)

That being said, as long as the HTML WG gets the feedback in the end,  
I'm not too concerned with the process of developing it.

 From reading over this draft, it seems to me that most of this  
feedback is ready to be delivered to the HTML WG right now. I see many  
specific points that identify a specific problem in great detail,  
outline why the current state of the spec doesn't work, and propose at  
lest one workable solution. That's more than enough data to go into a  
bug report.

I would expect that bug reports on these issues would most likely  
resolved expeditiously to everyone's satisfaction, and without any  
great controversy. The only potential problems I see are with details  
of syntax(*). I think those are best resolved within the HTML WG. I  
also suspect some of the comments may be issues for CSS, not HTML, for  
example the treatment of list markers. HTML completely defers to CSS  
on list rendering. Either way, it would be good to identify those  
kinds of issues ASAP rather than continuing to develop in a silo.

If the I18N WG would like these issues addressed before Last Call, I  
strongly recommend delivering the feedback to the HTML WG as soon as  
possible, ideally in the form of bug reports, one per distinct issue.

Regards,
Maciej

* - Examples of potential syntactic quibbles: (1) It would probably be  
better for the "bdi" attribute to act like a normal HTML boolean  
attribute where only presence or absence is relevant, not the value;  
(2) the name "bdi" is a bit obscure for a global attribute and may be  
prone to typos; (3) "submit_dir" does not match the usual conventions  
for HTML attribute naming. I raise these not to suggest changes to the  
draft but rather to point out that the HTML WG needs to review these  
issues and should do so ASAP.