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

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 9:18 PM, Phillips, Addison<addison@amazon.com> wrote:
> (personal response)
>
>> The concerns are that people won't implement ITS
>
> Saying "we're concerned no one will implement ITS" makes it sound like some exotic specification that may not find community support. But plenty of Recs have 'dir' and 'span' attributes/elements to allow for proper bidi markup. Having ITS define these for you in a conveniently referenced spec is a novelty, but shouldn't be used as a reason for "people" to think they "don't need to implement it" :-).
>

I agree. However, I wonder if this would be less scary for everyone if
we made a separate spec that just defined a "dir" attribute and a
<span> element as part of the widgets family of specs. Already having
one namespace is scary enough for most developers.

> I believe that most widget engines can easily implement these features because they already leverage the text layout capabilities of a browser, of the host operating system, or both and because most JavaScript engines already implement Unicode bidi. Setting base direction or directional override from markup is a small matter of implementing the parsing---not a total rewrite. If you specify it, I believe it can happen.
>
> I recognize that your WG is merely noting that the feature is "at risk". I believe the I18N WG would object to its removal and urge the webapps community to include bidi support.
>

We certainly want bidi support. That goes without question.

>> The concerns are that people won't implement ITS (or that authors
>> can
>> use the appropriate Unicode markers to achieve the same thing as
>> ITS).
>
> We have a FAQ about that. In fact, we just announced it a few minutes ago. Please see [1] for links.
>
> [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2009JulSep/0001.html
>

Thanks for the link. I will have a read at the new documents.

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

Received on Monday, 13 July 2009 16:41:25 UTC