New First Public Working Draft: Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML

The former wiki-based document by Aharon Lanin entitled "A Proposal for HTML Improvements for Bidi" has just been published as a W3C First Public Working Draft, with the (new) title "Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML".  This version includes edits based on the comments received by Aharon from bidi experts up to mid-February, but this is still a draft document and has been published now to facilitate further review and comment. It also contains some explicitly identified open issues.

For those not familiar with this document, it arose out of the frustrations of people who have to actually work with bidirectional text on the Web in everyday practical situations. For example, it covers issues related to re-use of fragments of text in various new locations by web apps or scripts, or situations where users need to type in or send bidirectional form data. It proposes additions to the HTML5 specification for such situations, which are not covered by the current HTML specification.  Many of the ideas in the document, however, are also relevant to markup formats in general, and there are some implications for CSS and XSL-FO (which we hope to address more directly in a subsequent document).

A new list has been set up for discussion of this draft and bidi issues in general at the W3C. Please send comments to public-i18n-bidi@w3.org. So that your mail is not bounced, please join the list by clicking on the link 'Subscribe to this list' at the top of the list archive ( http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-bidi/ ).   
 
Please do NOT send any further comments to the html-bidi-improvements list. That mailing list will no longer be used (although a record of all discussions that took place here will remain publicly available at http://groups.google.com/group/html-bidi-improvements ).

The plan is to obtain feedback as soon as possible on the new Working Draft from bidi experts and internationalization folks, then issue a new draft that incorporates the results of those discussions.  Only after that 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.

We look forward to your feedback!

RI

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Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Thursday, 4 March 2010 21:06:27 UTC