Re: bidi proposal

Hello Martin, others

Please see bellow

Martin J. Dürst wrote:
> Hello Aharon, fantasai, others,
>
> See below.
>
> On 2010/03/18 6:32, fantasai wrote:
> [snip]
>>
>> The old behavior would cause things like
>>
>> abcd.
>> <div style="display:inline">efg HIJK.</div>
>> LMNOP qrst.
>>
>> which is normally rendered as
>> abcd
>> efg KJIH.
>> PONML qrst.
>> to be rendered as
>> abcd. efg PONML .KJIH qrst.
>>
>> Since the author chose a block-level element, it's reasonable to assume
>> that they meant for that string of text to stay together as one unit.
>
> Yes indeed! That was the reason why we specified it that way in HTML4. 
> Using
>   <div style='display: inline">
> as given here (i.e. with a style *attribute*) is good to make the 
> example short, but isn't the way this would usually be used. What we 
> imagined is use cases such as being able to change e.g. a <ol> to an 
> inline list such as "1) apple; 2) orange; 3) pear."
>
> However, when we wrote the text in HTML4 
> (http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#style-bidi):
>
> "When a block element that does not have a dir attribute is 
> transformed to the style of an inline element by a style sheet, the 
> resulting presentation should be equivalent, in terms of bidirectional 
> formatting, to the formatting obtained by explicitly adding a dir 
> attribute (assigned the inherited value) to the transformed element."
>
> we were not aware of the fact that embeddings have the kind of side 
> effects that the attribute currently named 'bdi' intends to address. 
> So my current guess is that this should be fixed to say: "explicitly 
> addiing a dir attribute (assigned the inherited value) and a bdi 
> attribute (with value yes)".

+1.
I would agree that the inlined element remains the same wrt bidi behavior.
Firefox 3.6, IMHO, is right.

> Aharon, would that make more sense to you that the current Firefox 
> behavior?
>
> [snip]
>>  > I agree that it would be best to come up with an explicit spec of 
>> what
>>  > the expected bidi behavior is in all these strange combinations of
>>  > element type and display type.
>>
>> Yes.
>
> What are the other combinations that we have to look at?

Another point is when display:inline is combined with float:right.

Should inline elements flow (by side effect) from right to left?

There were a short thread about a similar point here (Markup vs CSS for 
bidi).
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-core/2009OctDec/0107.html
(Firefox 3.6 is, once again, right)

Maybe it is is the opportunity to try fix "misunderstandings" between 
browsers, and between browsers and specs.

Regards, Najib

Received on Friday, 19 March 2010 16:15:34 UTC