- From: fantasai <fantasai@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Fri, 21 Oct 2005 10:30:53 -0400
- To: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
- CC: GEO <public-i18n-geo@w3.org>, 'Steven Pemberton' <Steven.Pemberton@cwi.nl>
Richard Ishida wrote: > Chaps, > > In response to an email from Elika Eternad [1] I revised (largely rewrote) the > FAQ CSS vs. markup for bidi support [2]. > > [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2005OctDec/0016.html > [2] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/temp.html > [3] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-css-markup.html Richard, you are still saying that XHTML documents (served as XML) should be accompanied by a CSS sheet indicating the CSS mappings for XHTML bidi markup. The whole point of my comment was that *this is not true*. I do not have any objection about any other part of the document being clear, just that one being incorrect. XHTML is identified as being XHTML by its namespace, not its MIME type. BIDI controls are only a small fraction of the special processing necessary for an XHTML document to be intelligible. Without a default style sheet, not only with the bidi markup not work, but links will not work, form controls will not display, and all the headings and tables and lists and paragraphs will flow into a single, massively-long inline sequence. Basically, if you're facing a situation where you're sending XHTML to a generic XML processor that doesn't understand its markup conventions, you've got bigger problems than just BIDI not working. It's just like sending HTML to a generic SGML processor. The average XHTML author will not be doing any of that, he will be sending XHTML to an XHTML processor that understands what <a href=> and <h1> and <table> and <li> mean, and, consequently, will also understand what <bdo dir="rtl"> means. XHTML, under any MIME type, should be classified along with HTML as not needing extra CSS, not with generic XML. ~fantasai
Received on Friday, 21 October 2005 14:31:30 UTC