- From: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2005 11:15:32 +0900
- To: Tex Texin <tex@xencraft.com>, Sandra Bostian <sbos@loc.gov>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org
At 05:13 05/08/09, Tex Texin wrote: > >Sandra, yes of course. I am not suggesting CSS be made a requirement for >bidi. Only that it should be acceptable and considered best practice in >the right context. > >At the time the standard was written, I took the warning that bidi css >may be ignored by user agents to be a reflection of the state of the art >at the time, since most browsers were not able to support bidi with or >without css. It was an expression of the fact that for HTML, the bidi CSS properties, very contrary to other CSS properties, were not expected to be changed by the user, but were just re-stating what the HTML spec said already. For XML, of course, this is different, and that warning does not apply to XML. >It had not occurred to me that people were interpreting it to mean that >css implementers would intentionally choose not to support it or that >W3C was endorsing such a view. That would be counter to goals for >internationalization and making the web accessible to all. It would be counter to internationalization for XML, but not for HTML. Bidi in HTML is perfectly fine without CSS (if you really need to display Yiddish with Latin glyphs, you can do that by changing the letters). >(I will have to look around, but I am hard pressed to think of another >instance where the fact that a feature is optional became a >recommendation to not use it. Heck, there are many required features not >implemented or incompletely implemented and we don't offer the same >advice.) It's the other way round. For HTML, the use of CSS bidi properties was very clearly recommended against, and that's why the feature became optional. Regards, Martin.
Received on Wednesday, 17 August 2005 10:29:11 UTC