Re: Something for the SGML junkies

Peter Flynn wrote:
>   2) Should a core ISO text be based on an SGML declaration refering to
>      ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993?  How strong should the conformance statement be?
>
>If 10646 is to be embraced, then any conformance statement should
>contain a proviso such as "until implementation is widespread..."

The required conformance is stated the the i18n draft.

>   4) Should the ALIGN attribute be considered as an "inline style" feature
>      or an i18n feature?  Or are these two different features?
>
>ALIGN is a piece of visual styling with occasional semantic importance
>(such as ensuring an essential piece of information is placed
>adjacanet to certain text); I don't think anyone ever defined if the
>"left-right-ness" of an ALIGN should be reversed if the enclosing
>markup signaled DIR="RTL", which would seem to be the logical
>deduction (but I may have missed that). MY personal take is that if an
>author specifies ALIGN=RIGHT, then they mean it, regardless of the
>text direction.

It has been agreed that the ALIGN attribute will mean what it says. Its
meaning will not be reversed under the influence of DIR=RTL.

However, the default for ALIGN may be affeted by the DIR of the element.
This has been left out of the spec.

>   5) The i18n spec makes no mention of top-to-bottom character flows.  
>      Can one assume that this will never be needed?
>
>I don't think we should ever assume this, but I'm not aware of any
>input about it yet. DIR should probably be expanded to include TTB and
>BTT, and BDO should probably be renamed QDO if we want to be all-embracing.

BDO is specific to bidi, due to the mixture of RTL and LTR text in a single
element. Since I am not aware of a proposal to mix TTB and LTR in a single
element I don't think an extension is called for.
Jonathan Rosenne
JR Consulting
P O Box 33641, Tel Aviv, Israel
Phone: +972 50 246 522 Fax: +972 9 956 7353
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Jonathan_Rosenne/

Received on Sunday, 3 November 1996 00:56:19 UTC