[review feedback] Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts

These are consolidated comments from IBM Bidi Globalization Center of 
Competency on the document stored at:   - 
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/new-bidi-xhtml/Overview


Section In a nutshell
> "..Add a dir attribute to the html tag to set the default direction of 
your page if it is right-to-left. .."
I would suggest to drop the "if it is right-to-left" since dir is used for 
both LTR and RTL. 

>"...Use logical ordering of bidirectional text, rather than visual 
ordering, and let the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm take the strain..."
I would suggest to say: When possible prefer to use logical ordering of 
bidirectional text, rather than visual ordering, and let the Unicode 
Bidirectional Algorithm take the strain.
This is because for handling visual data properly blindly transform it to 
logical ordering is not optimal. 

Section Definitions

> Base direction 
There should be a distinction between base direction as a direction of UI 
(for example a page) and base text direction. HTML has only one mean for 
both - dir (and equivalent means). For example, when you mention: "... Use 
the dir attribute on block elements within the page only where you need to 
change the base direction..." you refer to GUI direction. 
I would suggest either to provide more detailed explainations on the 
differences or/and change "Base direction" to "base text direction"

>" ... the base direction is inherited from the default direction of the 
document, which is left-to-right (LTR) ..". 
Direction of the document is not always LTR. It can be RTL or even not 
defined, in which case for some browsers it will be derived from default 
browser language or browser GUI direction (which is derived from language 
to web browser application is translated). I would suggest to drop ", 
which is left-to-right(LTR)"..

>"UBA ... determine the directionality for bidirectional Unicode text .."
I don't think this is precise. UBA strictly can't be used for determining 
directionality of text. Having text in the text buffer and UBA at hand you 
can't identify the base text direction of this text. This is something 
that semantic / syntactic analysis of text can reliably do. UBA is used 
for proper layout and display of bidirectional Unicode text. 

Section:  Markup for text direction
Subsection: Visual vs. Logical ordering of text

>"....visual vs. logical approaches to writing bidirectional text "
Visual and logical approaches relate more to correlation between storage 
and display of text rather than to "writing". Thus I would suggest to 
replace the word writing by representing.



Best Regards,

Tomer Mahlin
GCoC Bidi architect
Bidi Development Lab


Phone: +972-2-6491784 | Mobile: +972-54-3368122 E-mail: tomerm@il.ibm.com

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