[Bug 18340] The root element's directionality should be a UA-specific value

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=18340

--- Comment #12 from Ian 'Hixie' Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> ---
My attempts at contacting Simon (both here, on IRC, and by e-mail) have failed.

Right now this bug is asking for a controversial change based on basically
hearsay. Which isn't to say that I don't trust bz or Simon, quite the opposite
in fact, but generally we rely on more than just a second-hand report of
something to make a controversial change. I call it controversial because there
is some disagreement about whether it should happen (q.v. comment 2).

Before I can make a call one way or the other, we either need to study what
popular user agents do in the main RTL locales. By "popular" I mean that they
have a double-digit market share in those locales specifically.

The two big RTL scripts I know about are Arabic and Hebrew.

Arabic's largest country seems to be Egypt. IE, Firefox, and Chrome have
significant market share in those countries.

Hebrew's largest country seems to be Israel. The same browsers are popular
there.

To test for default directionality, I would use this demo file:
   http://damowmow.com/playground/demos/bidi/002.html

To perform a test, one would need to install an OS native to the Israel or
Egypt locales without changing its default settings, and one would then need to
download and install a browser for that OS without changing its settings, and
finally one would need to visit that URL and determine if the box, list item
bullet, and punctuation appear on the right or left of the page.

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Received on Wednesday, 27 March 2013 22:33:14 UTC