Re: FPWD of Additional Requirements for Bidi in HTML (rename BDI by SCE)

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> wrote:
> I would suggest an attribute name that consists of one or more words. I
> think a three-letter acronym for a feature that probably won't be used that
> often in markup will confuse people when they see it.

I expect it to be used widely by all internationalized web apps.
MediaWiki outputs direction markers all over the place -- you have to
do it whenever you put user-provided content inline, if you want your
app to work correctly with bidi.  I count about 20 places in our code
(counting extensions) where we call our Language::getDirMark() method.
 It's called on every single row of history pages, log pages, recent
changes, etc. so that the user's summary doesn't interfere with the
directionality of the closing parenthesis.  I imagine other
internationalized web apps are similar.

Of course, it might not be obvious how common this is, because it's an
invisible Unicode character right now.  (I'm not sure why we don't use
&lrm; and &rlm; instead of raw characters.)  Being able to use an
easy-to-work-with HTML attribute would be nice.  "bdi" is a confusing
name, but a short name would be desirable given how *often* this needs
to be used.

Overall, as a web developer who knows a RTL language, I think the
proposed changes would be an excellent step forward for bidi on the
web.  Now if only we could handle user input without the cursor or
selection jumping around . . .

Received on Friday, 19 March 2010 20:12:12 UTC