RE: Direction in <li>

Hello Irfan,

It looks like you have digged up an interesting problem.
I'm copying the HTML WG (because it's them who have to issue an
erratum if we need one), the I18N IG, and the bidi list of the
Unicode consortium (because there also seem to be differences
with respect to the bidi algorithm).

At 11:20 02/02/11 -0800, Irfan Gowani wrote:
>Currently, IE displays the first li on the right and the keeps the
>second one to the left.  Do you think that is the correct behavior?

Ah, I see. I have created a test page, at
http://www.w3.org/2002/02/html-bidi-test/list-directions.html.

(if you can't access this, try the following one temporarily:
http://web5.w3.org/2002/02/html-bidi-test/list-directions.html)

This page is indeed rendered differently by different browsers:

- IE 6 puts the first list item to the right. It also doesn't show a
   bullet (which looks quite strange), and it changes the text slightly, to

     ."This is the first list item, with a setting of dir="rtl

   Bidi specialists, can you confirm what is the correct rendering of

     This is the first list item, with a setting of dir="rtl".

   in a rtl context (embedding), a straightforward rendering
   or the IE rendering?

- Amaya (latest version) and Tango render the first list item on the right,
   with a bullet on the very right (parallel to the second group of list 
items).

- Netscape 6 renders the list item to the left.

- Opera 6 does not do bidi at all (all list items on the left side).

- Frontpage (2002) does the same as IE, except that it displays
   a bullet.

I guess that if we need an erratum, we can go either the Amaya/Tango/
Frontpage way (and partly IE) to respect current practice. Not displaying
a bullet looks definitely like a bad idea. The alternative would be to
say that lists and their bullets have to be aligned, and go the Netscape
way.

While I don't think that having bullets on both sides of the page makes
much sense, it may be useful sometimes. It's always possible to bring
the bullet back to the right side by changing

<li dir='rtl'>This is the first list item, with a setting of dir="rtl".</li>

to

<li><span dir='rtl'>This is the first list item, with a setting of
dir="rtl".</span></li>


As for the different position of the dot and the quotes, that's really
just a question of a careful interpretation of the bidi algorithm, no
need for discussions.

Regards,    Martin.


>Thanks.
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: Martin Duerst [mailto:duerst@w3.org]
>Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2002 11:26 PM
>To: Irfan Gowani
>Subject: Re: Direction in <li>
>
>
>Hello Irfan,
>
>Nice to hear from you. I'm not sure what you mean.
>If you are thinking about two or more alternative
>behaviors, could you list them?
>
>Regards,   Martin.
>
>At 14:40 02/02/07 -0800, Irfan Gowani wrote:
>
> >Hi Martin,
> >I talked to you at the Unicode conference.  I wanted to ask you this
> >question but didn't get a chance.  I would appreciate if you could
>answer
> >the following question:
> >
> >What do you think should be the proper behavior of the following HTML?
> >
> ><html dir=ltr>
> ><ul>
> >   <li dir=rtl>First...</li>
> >   <li>Second...</li>
> ></ul>
> ></html>
> >
> >Thanks in advance!
> >
> >Irfan Gowani
> >Office International PM

Received on Tuesday, 12 February 2002 00:16:32 UTC