- From: Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin <aharon@google.com>
- Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 13:49:31 +0200
- To: Martin J. Dürst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Cc: Ehsan Akhgari <ehsan@mozilla.com>, public-i18n-bidi@w3.org
- Message-ID: <CA+FsOYbg8xQjp9Z-VodykxqAiPOvW7BbDF+jAJ_8SPR5Jf9v_g@mail.gmail.com>
Well, I, for one, am not so happy with my proposal :-). Its solution is to apply dir=auto to the individual user-visible attributes, even though in most cases the values of such attributes are not dynamic, but localized to the page locale, e.g. (in an English page) <input dir="auto" name="purpose" placeholder="The purpose of your visit.">. Using estimation for them is not just wasteful, but bound to reach the wrong conclusion occasionally. And it does not address the long-standing issue of no way to set the directionality of an attribute (other than using formatting characters). The canonical examples are: - <input dir="ltr" name="telephone" title="PHONE NUMBER.">, which has to be worked around as <span title="PHONE NUMBER."><input dir="ltr" name="telephone"></span> - <input dir="ltr" name="telephone" placeholder="PHONE NUMBER.">, which has no workaround other than RLE + PDF. What if we could instead have a new attribute, attribsdir="ltr|rtl|auto", which would determine the directionality in which the element's user-visible attributes must be displayed. A very important part of this would be the default value. IMO, it would be best if it could default to the dir attribute value of the closest ancestor - or the element itself unless it is <input> or <textarea> - that has an explicit dir attribute with a value other than "auto". If there is no such ancestor, the default is "ltr". Thus: - the only way to get attribsdir=auto is to specify it explicitly - the explicit dir attribute value of <input> and <textarea>, which is presumably meant to correspond to the directionality of their content, not their user-visible attributes, does not affect their default attribsdir. - with the exceptions of <input dir="...">, <textarea dir="...">, and <whatever dir=auto>, the result is backward-compatible. Examples: 1. <html><body><div title="?">: ltr 2. <html dir=rtl><body><div title="?">: rtl 3. <html><body><div dir=rtl title="?">: rtl 4. <html><body><div><div dir=rtl><div><div title="?">: rtl 5. <html dir=rtl><body><div><input dir=ltr title="?"> : rtl 6. <html><body><div dir=rtl><div dir="auto" title="?">hello</div>: rtl 7. <html><body><div dir=rtl><div dir="auto">ltr content<div title="?">: rtl 8. <html dir=rtl><body><div title="?" attribsdir="ltr">: ltr 9. <html dir=rtl><body><div title="?" attribsdir="auto">: auto Even if we couldn't get the <input> and <textarea> exception, we would still be ok - the page would just have to specify attribsdir explicitly on the problematic inputs. Aharon On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:32 AM, "Martin J. Dürst" <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>wrote: > On 2012/02/23 1:11, Ehsan Akhgari wrote: > >> On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 10:04 AM, Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin< >> aharon@google.com >> >>> wrote: >>> >> > One possibility is to divorce user-visible attributes from their elements' >>> directionality completely, always estimating the directionality of each >>> attribute by its content. This suffers from backwards compatibility >>> problems (since estimation is a heuristic that sometimes gives the wrong >>> answer). >>> >>> A better possibility is to divorce it only for elements under the >>> influence of dir=auto. Thus, if an element has dir=auto (explicitly or >>> implicitly, the latter being the case for<bdi>), each of the attributes >>> in >>> the subrtree rooted at that element, with the exception of elements >>> specifying dir="ltr" or dir="rtl" and their descendants, must be >>> displayed >>> to the user as if they had a dir=auto of heir own. >>> >>> >> I like the second proposal better. Although I have to say that it has >> been >> worded a bit vaguely. What I have in mind is for the title attribute in >> the following example to have a resolved RTL direction: >> >> <p dir="auto" title="RTL TEXT followed by ltr text">ltr text FOLLOWED BY >> RTL TEXT</p> >> > > I agree with Ehsan that the second proposal is better. It's something that > comes quite naturally once one gets used to it. > > Regards, Martin. >
Received on Thursday, 23 February 2012 11:50:19 UTC