- From: Eric Muller <emuller@adobe.com>
- Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:24:10 -0700
- To: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- CC: "Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin" <aharon@google.com>, "public-i18n-bidi@w3.org" <public-i18n-bidi@w3.org>, Stephen Zilles <szilles@adobe.com>
I agree with fantasai that CSS needs to pick one way. Otherwise, different implementations could end up displaying characters in different orders, certainly something that compromises the interchange of text. I also think that from the point of view of users, either way would be acceptable. I suspect that very few users will be able to make sense of a mixture of CSS controls and character controls, regardless of what CSS specifies. The only practical option for most users will be to enter something, see what comes out of an implementation, and tweak their input as needed to get the visual ordering they want. From the point of view of specification and logical consistency of the system, I would prefer to see bidi control characters reopened. This would make ...<span style='dir:ltr; unicode-bidi:embed'>...</span>... and ... ‪ ... ‬ ... equivalent (whenever the <span> is well formed). One benefit of the equivalence is that it is possible to transform the first form to the second in a step in a pipeline of HTML processing. With the current definition, this transformation step cannot happen independently of the reopening step (or more precisely, it has to occur after a transformation that has the effect of reopening). Eric.
Received on Monday, 19 March 2012 23:24:44 UTC