Comments on Best Practices for Authoring HTML: RTL scripts

Dear

I have a few comments on the /Best Practices for Authoring HTML:
Handling Right-to-left Scripts/ Working Draft of 14 July 2009. [1]

BP 1, Examples 6 and 7: I find it unfortunate that the presentational id
|rightjustified| and class |clearleft| are suggested as "best practice".
It would be better to suggest picking ids and classes based on the
meaning of the markup, rather than the (at this time) preferred
presentation. (See [2] for example.)

BP 3, Example 8:

> <html dir="rtl" lang="ar" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

As this looks like an XHTML document, I believe the attribute
|xml:lang=""| would be more appropriate.

BP 6, Example 9:

> <blockquote dir="ltr" lang="en" cite="Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)">But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.</blockquote>

This snippet is incorrect HTML for two reasons: it uses |cite=""|
incorrectly—the value should be a URI, and the contents of a
/block/quote must be blocks. A more correct version would be

> <blockquote dir="ltr" lang="en"><p>But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.</p></blockquote>

Hoping these comments will help to improve the draft
Ms2ger

[1] <http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-i18n-html-tech-bidi-20090714/>
[2] <http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/goodclassnames>

Received on Wednesday, 15 July 2009 17:52:49 UTC