Comments on "Visual vs. logical ordering of text"

The following are comments on "Visual vs. logical ordering of text" (http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/new-bidi-xhtml/qa-visual-vs-logical).

 

1)      In the navigator lines on the right side, "Quick answer" and "answer" both link to the Quick answer section.

2)      In "intended audience", the mention of "better understand how to declare the language of text on a Web page" is probably a left over from a dubious copy/paste.

3)      The link on "Unicode bidirectional algorithm" jumps to the article "Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts", not an obvious choice.

4)      The sentence  (about visual ordering) "It still persists to a degree today, out of habit" is patronizing and is not based on research. I suggest to replace it by something like "Visually ordered pages can still be found today on some sites."

5)      The sentence "It also reflects the order in which you would type the text as a content author" does not reflect actual practice. Even when browsers did not support logically ordered text, editors had some provisions for typing text in (more or less) logical order and store it in visual order.

6)      We find: "You would also have to manually rearrange any inline markup that spans more than one line (either before or after the change)."

In most cases, inline markup before the change would not be affected, thus it might be better to remove this reference.

7)      We find: "In addition, all the extra tags needed to manage the text would bloat your code and impact not only authoring time, but also bandwidth."
The impact on bandwidth is so minimal (in our days of wideband and enormous images) that it seems small minded to mention it.

8)      In the deficiencies of visual ordering, I would add that often the search dialog of browsers captures text in logical order, which causes the search key not to match the text stored in visual order, unless there is special logic in the browser to handle this issue.

9)      The link for "HTML4.01, 8.2.4 Overriding the bidirectional algorithm: the BDO element" goes to IANA!

 

 

Shalom (Regards),  Mati