- From: Matitiahu Allouche <matial@il.ibm.com>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:27:17 +0300
- To: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
- Cc: www-international@w3.org
Martin Duerst wrote: <quote> One more question: Is there a way to have an embedding (or also an override) behave in the way that at least I and Richard seem to have expected (i.e. just behaving like a single character/object of the respective directionality on the outside). Currently, it seems to me that adding ‎ (or ‏ if rtl) before and after might work, but I'm really not sure. </quote> Yes, adding ‎ before and after the span would prevent interaction with possible adjacent LTR text, as can be demonstrated with the BidiReference application (part of Unibook application) from the Unicode site. I think that we should distinguish between the Unicode Bidi Algorithmm which is defined by UAX #9 and will not be changed except for extremely strong reasons which I fail to imagine, and how user agents translate HTML dir attributes into UBA entities. This translation could be changed so that a <span dir="ltr"> . . . </span> would translate into <LRM><LRE> . . . <PDF><LRM>, which would implement what you understand is the author's intent. However, since all the most common browsers currently understand the test case's markup in the same way, changing this understanding will introduce incompatibilities, or at least transition problems, so I am not sure it is worth it. The alternative is to educate authors about the LRM trick (authors should be aware of a problem anyway, if they bother to check how their text looks like before publishing it). Shalom (Regards), Mati Bidi Architect Globalization Center Of Competency - Bidirectional Scripts IBM IsraelAgain Phone: +972 2 5888802 Fax: +972 2 5870333 Mobile: +972 52 2554160
Received on Thursday, 28 August 2008 13:29:05 UTC