Bug 27475 (bdo comment) [I18N-ACTION-462]

Hi Ian,

Quick note about [1]. Please redirect if you're not the right owner (you have the Bugzilla entry assigned to you).

I was tasked by the I18N WG with "follow up with editors on bdo/bdi/etc. and prepare an example for consideration by the wg to send them" on the assumption that my last comment on this bug had merit.

There are a few basic things I wanted to touch base with you on:

1. Do you think it would be reasonable to add an informative reference to our guidelines document for writing bidi to the @dir section (3.2.5.6 in the 5.0 doc) and bdo (4.5.27) (and possibly elsewhere)? That document is not in TR space: it lives at [2]. Would you need/want us to publish it in Note form to reference it?

2. When I search the Web I find that many page authors are confused about what <bdo> specifically does and when it should be used. <bdo> is almost never what the author needs. Do you think a health warning/usage example in the section on <bdo> would be appropriate? I'm thinking we could specifically use some form of the example at [3] with a note such as "The <bdo> element is only useful in situations where you want to completely override the normal Unicode bi-directional processing. Such situations are rare. For example..."

3. The example at the end of the current @dir section illustrates dir=auto and the <bdi> element (which are useful illustrations), but not the use of tight-wrapping with spans of @dir (the current best practice). We might propose a suggested replacement if we can come up with one that makes sense, but I haven't finished that part of my action item yet.

Thanks,

Addison

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=27475 
[2] http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/Overview 
[3] http://www.w3.org/International/articles/inline-bidi-markup/Overview#override 

Addison Phillips
Principal SDE, I18N Architect (Amazon)
Chair (W3C I18N WG)

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

Received on Wednesday, 23 September 2015 18:31:49 UTC