Feedback: GEO bidi tutorial

Tutorial: Creating Bidi XHTML/HTML Pages (Draft)
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/en/all.html

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- Great, positive, clear approach overall.
- Was a little unsure with Unicode bits about what to do with another encoding or how relevant, maybe more of "if you used Unicode, you would have this much extra control..." but I'm not clear how much of a difference.

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Link not working properly: http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/Overview,en.html.

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'How to mark up the document' section

"However, do not make the mistake of assuming that language declarations indicate directionality, or vice versa!

Even if a script tag is used in the language attribute value, this has no implication with regards to the directionality of the text in the user agent. You must always declare the directionality using the dir attribute."

- Somehow I didn't read 'script' as language script! It became clear to me when searching again within web page for script & (re-)seeing other places it was used. 
- Think this would make more sense if one para, rather than two.
 


- Expected to see 'dir' attribute in body solution here, especially when I see in a later section "Unnecessary use of the dir attribute impacts bandwidth and potentially creates unnecessary additional work for page maintenance."
- Thought the IE issue well & clearly presented.
- But you do not use the 'body' solution to explain how you can get around this & avoid superfluous 'dir' markup.
- With table & dir, would be useful if the graphic displayed the alignment & wrapping behaviour of the text within the table - not clear to me - maybe slide to small...
- Didn't expect 'Be logical, not visual' section next.

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'Be logical, not visual' section

- It's not clear why this information is relevant to me.
- What problem does this address?
- Where will I encounter it?
- Visual/logical ordering - notions of - are not really on my radar.
- Explanation: text and/or pictures?

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Don't go markup crazy

- "Do not use inline bidi markup unless the Unicode bidi algorithm is insufficient on its own." When might this be the case?
- The slide image says "use inheritance from the HTML tag". Want to benefit from inheritance, but don't want scrollbar position, etc, to change.
- "Removing superfluous markup will significantly simplify the document, and reduce bandwidth - which may be an important consideration in countries where Arabic is spoken." Why? Because poorer bandwidth? This may be the case in places for Arabic speakers not in Arabic countries.

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Bidi algorithm basics

- "This works because each character in Unicode ..." So not relevant to me if I'm not using Unicode? Is ability to control this, good reason to upgrade encoding? Not sure what the issues are if I'm not using Unicode.

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Disabling the bidi algorithm

- 'bdo' vs 'dir' has always confused me; this section (& the whole tutorial helps especially re punctuation, etc).

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What about CSS?

- "You should use the markup provided," Then why is this CSS provided?
- "even if stylesheets are not supported by a particular user agent." What sorts? Examples would be useful.
- Don't see what point 2 adds, ie: "The HTML specification specifies the expected behaviour of user agents dealing with bidi markup. In other words, the user agent should know how to deal with the bidi markup defined by HTML without the need for any expression using CSS syntax."
- How to deal with bidi in RSS? Who is addressing this? & how many parties have ownership of this issue?


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Received on Wednesday, 1 June 2005 15:52:29 UTC