I18N-ISSUE-159: Extend output or create a new element for injected text [.prep-HTML5]

I18N-ISSUE-159: Extend output or create a new element for injected text [.prep-HTML5]

http://www.w3.org/International/track/issues/159

Raised by: Richard Ishida
On product: .prep-HTML5

bdi is fine and dandy for wrestling with your typical inline bidirectional text issues, but its use for injected text is a little strange, if you step back.

Essentially we are telling developers all around the world that anywhere they insert text into their page they have to add some bidi-specific markup.  It's not semantically elegant, and it feels a little odd - and I guess most people will just not think about the possibility of bidi being an issue most of the time.

I suspect that a better approach would be to have an element dedicated to marking the location of inserted text, and secretly endow that element with the properties we need for bidi support. As such it would be identical to using bdi, but it would seem more natural to non-bidi-aware developers.

We already have an element that is close to this: output[1]. I'm thinking that we should ask the HTML WG to either expand the role of output so that it's not just for the result of calculations, or create a new element (that is essentially an alternative to bdi).

Received on Tuesday, 1 May 2012 14:34:36 UTC