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

(just an idea - not replying in bugzilla, because I'm not entirely sure it
is a good one)

Seems like the gatekeepers are willing to change the spec of <br> to become
"hard" (like ie/webkit),
but are reluctant to add a new attribute, or even a new element, which would
make the soft break functionality available,
suggesting &#x2028; as an alternative (i.e. adding to the spec a requirement
that it should be supported).

A possible compromise might be to add named entities, perhaps &sbr; (soft
break) or &vbr; (visual break) for U+2028, and &br; for U+2029 (this might
increase the chance that browser-makers would actually add support for these
characters).

Personally, I think that poetry and addresses alone (not to mention other
use cases mentioned in the bug) are good enough use cases for adding the
missing functionality as a 1st class citizen (element or attribute). At
least it seems that it was important enough to be added to early versions of
HTML.

Amit

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 11:31 PM, <bugzilla@jessica.w3.org> wrote:

> http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10828
>
> Adil <adil@diwan.com> changed:
>
>           What    |Removed                     |Added
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>                 CC|                            |adil@diwan.com
>
> --- Comment #18 from Adil <adil@diwan.com> 2010-10-20 21:31:56 UTC ---
> (In reply to comment #17)
> > If this request is just to change the <br> element's definition to match
> IE,
> > then that is definitely something we can do. Should I just change the
> spec to
> > instead say "A br element must separate paragraphs for the purposes of
> the
> > Unicode bidirectional algorithm. [BIDI]" ?
>
> I would like to see <br> defined as paragraph separator by default.
> However,
> this alone does not solve a specific use case that affects my work. I am
> developing a web app that displays text extracted from a book or a
> newspaper in
> a similar way to this site:
> http://newspapers.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/1118868.
>
> The requirement is to match exactly the line breaks in the original
> document
> regardless of the font width. The problem is, for mixed rtl-ltr text, I
> need to
> insert a line break that is not a bidi paragraph break.
>
> If <br> is redefined as a bidi paragraph break instead of a line-break
> then, in
> this case, the <br> will give the wrong reordering for the broken line.
>
> --
> Configure bugmail: http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/userprefs.cgi?tab=email
> ------- You are receiving this mail because: -------
> You are on the CC list for the bug.
> You reported the bug.
>
>