Re: [WIDGET PC] i18n comment 6: Use of its:dir

On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Richard Ishida<ishida@w3.org> wrote:
> Hi Marcos,
>
> Without understanding why folks think these things, it's a little difficult to provide specific discussion points, but the key point behind ITS is that it describes types of information you need for a well-internationalized and easily localizable specification.  The implementation of those ideas is secondary.
>

No, the implementation is important, particularly for the developers
that need to use the technology.

> One such type of information relates to bidi support.  If your markup is to support use for the languages of the millions of people who use a script such as Arabic, Hebrew, Thaana, N'ko, etc, you need to provide a simple way to set and change the base direction for parts of the document. It is important for that information to be inherited through contained elements - you can't do that using Unicode controls.  Markup is also preferable to control codes because it makes editing and maintenance of code much easier.
>

Again, the working group fully understands the need for this
technology (it's why we included it).

> ITS happens to suggest a name for the its:dir attribute and describe what values you'd need, and what that means.  But it's not about supporting ITS here.  It's about providing a mechanism for people using right-to-left and particularly bidirectional text to achieve what they need to. I don't think that is optional. Call the attribute whatever you want, I believe you need it and its behaviour to be available to users.
>

I totally agree with you.

> I didn't review the Widgets spec myself (we have so much to cover that we have to share things around), but I'm starting to think maybe I should try to find the time, if I can. For example, I noticed that the its:dir attribute can be used on the name, author, and description elements, but I would have expected that for a widget in Persian, say, you'd just set the attribute on the widget element and it should take care of all those without the author having to separately and laboriously markup them up.  (Think about HTML - you put dir on the html element, not on every p, div, list, etc.)  You'd only need to use dir on name, author, span, etc if you need to *change* the base direction.  (We had a similar gap in SVG Tiny markup before Xmas, which they fixed as soon as we pointed it out to them.)
>

hhhmmm... true.

> Well, I hope that's of some use.  I'll try to take another look next week, if I can.
>

Please do take a look. However, the WG can't wait for comments to
progress to CR. We've been in Last Call twice, and ITS has been in
there both times so we had hoped that the I18N WG would have spotted
issues such as the one above.

My (personal) recommendation is that we drop ITS support in P&C and
create a new spec that just defines dir and <span> (in the widget
namespace).

-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Monday, 13 July 2009 16:41:22 UTC