[Bug 10828] i18n comment 4 : at least by default, <br> should constitute a bidi paragraph break

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10828

Aharon Lanin <aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
             Status|RESOLVED                    |REOPENED
         Resolution|FIXED                       |

--- Comment #39 from Aharon Lanin <aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.com> 2010-12-23 16:20:53 UTC ---
The reason that this bug was filed is expressed (by me) in comment 11:

"What IE and Webkit do for <br> is treat it as a bidi paragraph break, despite
the spec saying otherwise. This is not about to change, because what RTL users
expect from <br> is bidi paragraph separation."

Or, as fanatasai summarized it in comment 25, "Current definition of <br> is
incompatible with widespread usage and implementation."

Well, it turns out that part of these statements is out of date. As I learned a
few days ago from Simon Mantagu, IE did change, to an extent. While IE7 indeed
treated <br> as a bidi paragraph break, even in its standards mode, IE8 treats
it as bidi whitespace (i.e. per the HTML4 spec) - when in *its* standards mode.
IE8 continues to treat <br> as a bidi paragraph break in its quirks mode and
its IE7 compatibility mode.

I guess that this should not be surprising, given that IE's standards mode is
about following standards, and HTML4 is the current standard. However, it did
surprise me, since I thought I had tested this in IE8 before filing the bug. (I
wasn't careful to make sure I was in IE8 standards mode.)

Please note that the other part of the reason for filing this bug remains
unaffected: despite the HTML spec limiting <br> to esoteric uses like poetry
and addresses, most of the time that <br> is used, it is used as the HTML
equivalent of a plain text newline. When used that way in a bidi document, it
does not work as intended unless it is a bidi paragraph break.

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Received on Thursday, 23 December 2010 16:20:57 UTC