f2f meeting day 1 notes: resolutions on sections 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4 of "Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML"

 Day 1 of the face-to-face meeting on Additional Requirements for Bidi in
HTML<http://www.google.com/url?q=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2FTR%2Fhtml-bidi%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNGy8aYw_oNMsDbjlyRq4WOIFu5BnA>(Adil
Allawi, Aharon Lanin, Behdad
Esfahbod, Bob Jung, Craig Cummings, Ehsan Akhgari, Fantasai, Mark Davis,
Matitiahu Allouche, Najib Tounsi, Norbert Lindenberg, Roozbeh Pournader, Tab
Atkins, and Xiaomei Ji attending) has discussed the open issues on proposal
sections 2.1, 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, and 3.4. It has achieved consensus on the
following points, offering resolution to all current open issues in those
sections:

   1. (Sections 2.1, 3.3) bdi has an effect on all and only elements that
   are rendered as CSS non-replaced inline boxes, e.g.:
      1. will be ignored by all elements that are not display:inline (or
      display:runin when it behaves as display:inline).
      2. display:inline-block should continue to use isolation, as stated in
      the spec, and should ignore bdi.
      3. bdi will be ignored by floating and position:absolute (and fixed)
      elements.
      4. block elements with display:inline will be subject to bdi, and will
      have it on by default.
   2. (Section 2.1) bdi will do isolation (not separation).
   3. (Section 2.1) CSS equivalent of bdi is unicode-bidi:isolate. Thus, it
   does not inherit (neither in CSS nor in HTML).
   4. (Section 2.1) Rename bdi to ubi (Unicode Bidi Isolate).
   5. (Section 2.1) ubi syntax is ubi=”ubi”|””|”off”. The “ubi” and empty
   string values are equivalent (and specify isolation).
   6. (Section 2.1, 2.2, 3.1) The default value for ubi is “off”, except
   when dir=auto and for block elements with display:inline. It will not be on
   by default for <a> or <br> or display:inline-block.
   7. (Section 2.1) Add a best practice for authors to use bdi on <a>, once
   at least one browser implements ubi.
   8. (Section 3.1) Add a new HTML attribute that affects the behavior of
   all descendant <br> elements.
      1. Tentative syntax for the attribute: bidi-break=”soft”|”hard”. The
      “soft” value means to treat the <br> as the UBA bidi class WS. The “hard”
      value means to treat it as B.
      2. The default value is “hard”.
      3. Thus, to get behavior like U+2028 in mark-up, use <br
      bidi-break=soft>. It could also be specified on an ancestor, e.g. for
      poetry.
      4. The CSS equivalent is a new property, unicode-bidi-break:hard|soft.
   9. (Section 3.2) All non-collapsed newlines, e.g. in <pre> and
   <textarea>, are treated as UBA paragraph breaks.
   10. (New section) HTML5 and CSS2.1 should clarify that U+2028 and U+2029
   in <pre> and <textarea> should behave as they do in plain text.
   11. (Section 3.4) Approach ECMAScript people about giving optional
   explicit direction parameters to alert(), confirm(), and prompt().
   12. (Section 3.4) In the absence of direction passed in via an explicit
   parameter, dialog text should be broken up into paragraphs, and the
   direction of each paragraph be automatically detected and applied in the
   paragraph’s display.
   13. (New section) User agents must implement the Unicode spec re Default
   Ignorable Code Points (Unicode Standard version 5.2, Chapter
5<http://unicode.org/versions/Unicode5.2.0/ch05.pdf>,
   section 5.21), including never displaying the LRM, RLM, LRE, RLE, LRO, RLO,
   and PDF characters inappropriately (e.g. as empty boxes or advance widths)
   even if the underlying platform does not handle them properly. In
   particular, this must be the case for script dialog text, page titles, and
   tooltips.

Aharon