Summary of bidi discussion with Social Web WG

In preparation for the discussion tomorrow (Thursday) during the i18n 
telecon, here are the minutes of the discussion held yesterday (Tuesday) 
with the Social Web group.

https://www.w3.org/2016/08/02-social-minutes.html#item07

I wasn't invited to speak until 5 minutes before the end, and the 
discussion wasn't as productive as i hoped.  A lot of the feedback 
centred around dislike of the idea of using a separate direction 
property to set the default base direction (which actually i wasn't 
recommending, it was just one possibility on the table).  There was 
strong preference for first-strong detection coupled with Unicode 
control codes for problem cases for plain text strings (eg. name), and 
presumably first-strong detection for default paragraph direction when 
using markup (i guess in the absence of markup to the contrary, but that 
wasn't discussed).  Grounds for pushback mainly centred on the 
supposition that there are no APIs out there that do that.

So a key question for Thursday is whether anyone sees any advantages in 
using a separate direction property.  Would first-strong detection 
coupled with control code/markup for tricky cases be sufficient?  To my 
mind, this may be ok for plain text, although there appears to be a 
problem that people can often not access the control codes (and when 
they can, not easily).  That may need fixes to keyboards, however, 
rather than to the model.

For marked up text, i suspect that the spec needs to be a little more 
careful in the way it indicates how the default direction should be 
established for paragraphs.  If the paragraph starts with <p dir="rtl"> 
then first-strong should be not used.

Btw, i put together some tests for Twitter and Facebook that look at 
various problem situations and show the results.  See
https://github.com/w3c/i18n-activity/wiki/Bidi-handling-in-Facebook-and-Twitter

ri

Received on Wednesday, 3 August 2016 11:44:55 UTC