Suggested syntax for the hflip attribute

At the recent workshop on the document 'Additional Requirements for Bidi 
in HTML' held at the Israeli W3C office, an improvement was suggested 
for the hflip attribute, to give authors the option of either specifying 
a separate URL for ltr and rtl versions of an image, or  that the image 
should be flipped in rtl context.

IIRC, the original suggestion was made by Amit Aharonovitch, and I 
strongly support it. Depending on image design, simple mirroring for RTL 
can often produce an ugly effect (for example with images that use 
shadows or gradients), and authors may well prefer to take on the extra 
burden of maintaining separate images for LTR and RTL, but will still 
want to use this attribute rather than having to swap the images 
depending on page direction.

The following is my proposal for the syntax of the attribute:

| hflip  (%URI;|flip|none) # none
|
| This attribute specifies an alternative image for use when the
| computed direction of the image's parent element is RTL. When
| the value of the attribute is a URI, the URI specifies the location
| of the alternative image resource. When the value is "flip", the
| image should be horizontally mirrored by the user agent. By default,
| the value is "none", which means that the image is rendered
| identically in both LTR and RTL contexts.

By design, this proposal does not include the possibility of an original 
image designed for RTL context, to be flipped in LTR context.

Received on Wednesday, 7 April 2010 21:48:46 UTC