RE: New tutorial for REVIEW: Creating Bidi XHTML/HTML Pages

A few comments.

1) On slide 3 (and others like it), I originally thought that the blue 
lines were links to specific topics.  In fact, clicking anywhere in the 
image leads to the next slide.  This is ok, but fooled me at first.  You 
may want to warn the readers.

2) On slide 6, you could note that specifying dir="rtl" does not affect 
the paragraph direction of the title bar.  Depending on the browser and 
the platform, adding <RLE> ... <PDF> around the title text may give it an 
RTL paragraph direction.

3) On slide 8, you write "dialog boxes, such as the one shown on the 
slide, will be mirror imaged."
As far as I know, this applies only to alert message boxes created with 
Javascript.  I don't know what other types of dialog boxes there may exist 
for an HTML page.
Maybe the example would be more piquant if it displayed a wholly or mainly 
English message, whose ending punctuation would appear on the left side (I 
am not sure that in your current example, naive users will notice that the 
Hebrew and Arabic strings have swapped places around the "W3C" string).

4) On slide 10, it might be useful to remind the reader that the example 
shows text with RTL paragraph direction.  You might also explain the 
meaning of the digits below the arrows, or remove them.
In the last paragraph, the reference to 2nd and 3rd line are inverted: the 
logical encoding order is shown on the *second* line and the visual 
encoding order on the *third* line.

5) On slide 11, you may want to mention the ISO encoding by its precise 
IANA name, "ISO-8859-8".

6) On slide 13, "the that the" => "that the"
I also suggest to add an hyphen between "ISO" and "8859" in the list of 
encodings facing "Visual" and "Logical".

7) In slide 16, if the example included more than one word for each 
language, you could add that the relative order of words in a "language 
run" is also preserved.

8) In slide 20, I don't see the benefit of pinpointing that reducing 
bandwidth "may be an important consideration in countries where Arabic is 
spoken".  It is equally applicable to countries speaking any language, but 
somehow implies that Arabic speaking countries might have scarcer 
bandwidth resources than other countries.
Also, the goal is not to reduce "bandwidth" but to reduce "bandwidth 
requirements".

9) On slide 26, I suggest to replace the sentence "Space and 
punctuation...either type of script." by:
"Spaces and punctuation are not strongly typed as either LTR or RTL in 
Unicode, because they may be used in either type of script."

10) On slide 27, you should add that the last sentence ("Note also that 
alongside...") applies only to European digits.

11) On slide 30, the sample HTML code (in red) shows the exclamation mark 
on the left of the Arabic words.  I don't know *any* HTML editor that 
would show this in source editing mode, so it may give false expectations 
to readers.  On the other hand, showing the exclamation mark on the right 
side seems to contradict what we are trying to explain.  Whatever solution 
is chosen, a note should explain the potential difference between text as 
displayed in source mode and text displayed in WYSIWYG mode.

12) On slide 31, same remark: the exclamation mark and the entity (&rlm;) 
or numeric reference are likely to be displayed on the righ side of the 
Arabic words by a real-life source editor.

13) On slide 34, the last sentence ("Putting markup around the comma...") 
is not correct: the markup solution would be to put markup around each of 
the Arabic words.  The egg/hammer metaphor is thus less appropriate.

14) (removed)

15) In slide 39, same comment as 11 and 12 above: the HTML code in red 
shows the content of the span as if the editor was capable of applying the 
markup while displaying the source, which is over-optimistic and gives 
false expectations.

16) In slide 41, I believe that the red text should say "</span>" (and not 
"<span>").

17) In slide 41, the last paragraph says "This is not a bug".  True, this 
is not a bug in the display agent, but it is a bug in the source text. The 
space is supposed to separate the Hebrew part from the following English 
part, so it should not be included in the Hebrew span.

18) On slide 43, the code example is correct in the last line, but the dir 
attribute is inverted in the red text.

19) On slide 50, the codes for RLE and LRE are swapped (both in the image 
and in the table within the text).

20) In slide 51, "Unicode control character have" => "Unicode control 
characters have"

21) On slide 52: is there a rule against referencing documents other than 
W3C's?  If not, a reference to the Unicode Bidi Algorithm (Unicode UAX #9) 
seems in order.


Shalom (Regards),  Mati
           Bidi Architect
           Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts
           IBM Israel
           Phone: +972 2 5888802    Fax: +972 2 5870333    Mobile: +972 52 
2554160