- From: Helmut Wollmersdorfer <helmut@wollmersdorfer.at>
- Date: Wed, 20 Dec 2006 15:29:13 +0100
- To: www-html@w3.org
Paul Nelson (ATC) wrote: > The Unicode Bidirectional algorithm(http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/) > provides the guidance on how to process this. The correct layout is [1]. Unicode BIDI is the low level protocol, which cannot give an answer about HTML. > Because the Hebrew is a RTL script, the addition of the span does > nothing to change the layout. One could just as easily have put: > <p>English1 עברית2. > עברית3 > Englisch4.</p> A first reader of http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.2 will only mark the Hebrew words with 'dir', similar to the well known usage of other inline markup, e.g. <b> or <em>. And he would expect the '. ' (dot-space) to be in the style of the parent element. In the specs of HTML the above enclosing is given as example: | Thus, to express a Hebrew quotation, it is more intuitive to write | | <Q lang="he" dir="rtl">...a Hebrew quotation...</Q> If the authors of the HTML spec intended layout [1], then this is not 'KISS' (Keep It Simple, Stupid). This needs a HTML author to know the details of the Unicode BIDI algorithm, especially all the neutral and weak characters. Another symptom, that this part of the HTML spec needs re-design and/or re-wording, is the large amount of test cases, FAQs, bugs, inconsistancy across browsers etc. > If you wanted the layout of [2], you can do the following to force the > right bidirectional embedding: > <p>English1 עברית2. > <span dir=ltr>עברית3 > Englisch4.</span></p> This is not an intuitive solution. Common sense would place the <span ...> between '2' and '.', because the neutral '. ' should be forced LTR. Or include only the '. ' into a <span ...>. Helmut Wollmersdorfer
Received on Wednesday, 20 December 2006 14:29:45 UTC