Re: bidi embedding for block-level elements

On Mon, 18 Jan 2010, fantasai wrote:
> On 01/14/2010 12:49 AM, Simon Montagu wrote:
> > On 01/11/2010 11:35 PM, fantasai wrote:
> > > On 11/26/2009 10:54 PM, Simon Montagu wrote:
> > > > 
> > > > I assume your Gecko example is using a very recent version of 
> > > > Gecko, such as a nightly build or a beta of Firefox 3.6? I fixed 
> > > > this issue only a few months ago.
> > > > 
> > > > The HTML standard does specify what to do in this case, see 
> > > > http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#style-bidi:
> > > > 
> > > > "When a block element that does not have a dir attribute is 
> > > > transformed to the style of an inline element by a style sheet, 
> > > > the resulting presentation should be equivalent, in terms of 
> > > > bidirectional formatting, to the formatting obtained by explicitly 
> > > > adding a dir attribute (assigned the inherited value) to the 
> > > > transformed element."
> > > > 
> > > > In practice, however, since browsers are not consistent, authors 
> > > > will have to use CSS properties to achieve the expected results.
> > > 
> > > Does this mean applying "unicode-bidi: embed" to all block-level 
> > > elements? Because that seems like it fulfill those requirements.
> > 
> > I was thinking in terms of applying "unicode-bidi: embed" ad hoc 
> > whenever applying "display: inline" to a specific element, but 
> > applying it wholesale to all block-level elements will also work, of 
> > course.
> 
> In that case, I suggest the we add it to the sample default style sheet 
> for HTML 4 in the CSS2.1 appendix, and recommend the HTMLWG add some 
> wording about block-level elements defining bidi embedding boundaries to 
> the HTML5 spec (and perhaps using CSS's "unicode-bidi: embed" rule as an 
> example).

Can you confirm what rule should be added to the HTML5 recommended style 
rules? This is an area where this has changed a lot over time (e.g. CSS2 
used to have something like this then it was removed) so I'd like to make 
sure I get this exactly right and that everyone agrees it's the right 
thing to do.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 23:02:08 UTC