Re: This week's Q&A (qa-bidi-controls)

At 15:05 03/06/17 +0100, Richard Ishida wrote:

>That leaves us with a gap for our weekly offering.  To get around this
>problem (given that Martin doesn't want to publish his new Q&A just
>yet), I wrote something today that may serve, will hopefully be not very
>controversial, and will also draw attention to the newly published
>Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages.  You can find it at:
>http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-controls.html

These are my specific comments on this Q&A:

- Good and timely topic, good material!

- The background is much too long, and counterproductive.
   We have discussed this before, but I think this is an excellent
   example to try to explain what I'm concerned about. In
   http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-headers-charset.html,
   I have tried to give a background to follow the general format,
   but to keep it as short as possible, so that the reader can
   see the answer and go there directly in most cases.
   On the other hand, on
   http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-controls.html,
   the background is very long, more than a full page on most screens/
   browsers. Also, it explains the problems, but also spends a lot
   of time and real estate on explaining the wrong solution. There is
   some probability that somebody reads half on the page and then goes
   off to use the wrong solution.

- It is unclear to everybody except readers of Hebrew (i.e. also
   readers of Arabic) why the first example in 'background' is wrong.

- An example of the correct syntax is missing. Remember: The Web
   got big by people copying examples!

- For the justification of why to use markup, there are only some
   citations, but not really a convincing explanations of why this
   is the right thing to do.

- Do we need something for readers who look at this on a browser
   that doesn't support bidi (correctly)?


Regards,    Martin.

Received on Tuesday, 17 June 2003 11:24:09 UTC