[Bug 23260] Make the dir attribute use isolation instead of embedding

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=23260

--- Comment #8 from Aharon Lanin <aharon.lists.lanin@gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Ian 'Hixie' Hickson from comment #7)
> So does this mean that with this change we can drop <bdi>?

If we were doing this from scratch now, we would not bother introducing <bdi>.
I am not sure it is a good idea to drop it, though, because it is starting to
be used, and because of its dir="auto" default, it is handy for marking off
unknown-direction inserts.

> Why didn't we do this to start with instead of introducing <bdi>?

When we filed https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10807, we were
afraid to make backward-incompatible changes. Furthermore, at that time, there
were no Unicode isolates, and it was not yet well accepted that Unicode LRE and
RLE should have been defined as isolates from the get-go.

However, we did not suggest adding <bdi>. What we asked to do was to add a new
boolean attribute that would control isolation. Thus, <span dir="rtl" ubi> and
<span ubi> would be isolating; <span dir="rtl"> (or <span dir="rtl" ubi="off")
would not.

That proposal was not accepted. You proposed doing isolation via an element
instead of an attribute in
https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10807#c6. I objected several
times in follow-up comments, but you insisted, and in the end I deferred to
you. I was not yet aware that requiring an element gives the additional
problems I described above (microformatting and the block/inline dichotomy).

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Received on Tuesday, 24 September 2013 08:22:00 UTC