[Comment on its tagset WD] On (Bi)Directionality

Hello,

"4.4 Directionality" [1] of WD-its-20051122 defines the "dir"
attribute and an optional "bdo" attribute, analogious to
HTML 4's "dir" attribute and the bdo element.

In designing XHTML 2.0, the HTML WG coordinated with the I18N
WG/IG for a better design, and came up with the single "dir"
attribute with 4 possible values, namely "ltr", "rtl", "lro",
and "rlo" [2].  IMHO, this is simpler than the current ITS
design.

The OASIS DocBook TC also coordinated with them on adding
BIDI support to DocBook and agreed to use the same design as
XHTML 2.0, and DocBook V4.3 and later incorporated it.

The I18N Activity also extended the XMLspec DTD this way to
allow BIDI override markup for their spec work [3].

Since a couple of existing/emerging vocabularies are already
migrating to this design, I would suggest that the ITS WG
consider this design as a possible ITS markup for dealing
with bidirectionality.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-its-20051122/#dir
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-xhtml2-20050527/mod-bidi.html#col_Bi-directional
[3] http://www.w3.org/International/xmlspec/002/documentation/styleguide.html#bdo

Thanks,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Thursday, 24 November 2005 09:49:23 UTC