[Bug 10828] New: i18n comment 4 : new attribute: bidibreak

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10828

           Summary: i18n comment 4 : new attribute: bidibreak
           Product: HTML WG
           Version: unspecified
          Platform: PC
        OS/Version: Windows XP
            Status: NEW
          Severity: normal
          Priority: P2
         Component: HTML5 spec (editor: Ian Hickson)
        AssignedTo: ian@hixie.ch
        ReportedBy: public-i18n-bidi@w3.org
         QAContact: public-html-bugzilla@w3.org
                CC: mike@w3.org, public-html-wg-issue-tracking@w3.org,
                    public-html@w3.org, public-i18n-bidi@w3.org


Comment from the i18n review of:
http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/

Comment 4
At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/html5-bidi/
Editorial/substantive: S
Tracked by: AL

Location in reviewed document:
undefined [http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/spec.html#contents]

Comment:This is a part of the proposals made by the "Additional Requirements
for Bidi in HTML" W3C First Public Working Draft. For a full description of the
use cases, please see 
http://www.w3.org/International/docs/html-bidi-requirements/#br-as-separator
[http://www.w3.org/International/docs/html-bidi-requirements/#br-as-separator]
. Here is the proposal made there:

Support a new HTML element attribute, bidibreak=hard|soft. On a <br> element,
the "soft" value means that the <br> is to be treated as a UBA bidi class WS
(whitespace) character, as was 
required in HTML 4 [http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/text.html#edef-BR]
. The "hard" value means that the <br> is to be treated as UBA bidi class B,
i.e. paragraph break. If neither is specified, the bidibreak attribute value is
inherited from the parent. Thus, when specified on an element other than <br>,
bidibreak serves to determine the behavior of descendant <br> elements. For the
root element, the default is "hard" (which, of course, spreads to every <br>
element in the document, unless an intervening element sets bidibreak
otherwise).

Alternatively, if and only if all major browser makers reach unanimous
consensus that the default value for the root element should be "soft" and
commit to implementing it as such to the HTML WG prior to the new HTML
specification publication, that too would be fine.

When the author wants to use <br> just to wrap a line without adding bidi
separation, <br bidibreak="soft"> will do the trick.

Reasonable use cases for specifying bidibreak="soft" on non-<br> elements would
include an element containing poetry, as well as the root element of a document
that relies on the bidi behavior specified for <br> by HTML 4.

When <br> introduces a UBA paragraph break, the base direction of the new UBA
paragraph will be determined by the computed direction of the nearest ancestor
element whose bidi properties require its contents to be in a separate UBA
paragraph (or sequence of paragraphs), e.g. a block element or an element
directionally isolated by the ubi attribute (which is being proposed in a
separate bug). Furthermore, for every element between there and the <br> that
results in the creation of an embedding or override level, e.g. a <bdo> element
or any element with a dir attribute or a value other than "normal" for the
unicode-bidi CSS property, the correspondeng embedding or override level is
re-introduced at the start of the new UBA paragraph (to be closed at the end of
the element or the UBA paragraph, whichever comes first).

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Received on Wednesday, 29 September 2010 13:17:54 UTC