Re: [css-writing-modes] Does not mention "auto" for the "direction" property

On 2016/09/25 21:25, Lina Kemmel wrote:
> נשלח מהתקן iPad שלי באמצעות IBM Verse
>
>  On 22 Sep 2016, 7:20:43 PM, fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net wrote:
>
>
>                > It is, however, marked very explicitly as "You shouldn't use this
>      > unlessr you're a UA."
>
>
>              It's added value is exactly NON UA... There should be something
>     allowing to control direction of UI and text when I am not UA, too.
>     Unicode-bidi is not sufficient.

As one of the people involved in the design of the 'direction' and 
'unicode-bidi' properties, I agree with fantasai that the uses for 
'unicode-bidi' (besides UAs) are few and far between.

However, saying that it's limited strictly to UAs is going too far.

Cases where it can be useful may be the following:

1) Arabic or hebrew script displayed with a font that uses equivalent 
Latin glyphs, and for which the direction has to be fixed because RTL 
Latin doesn't make sense.

2) XML or XML-like documents where direction is given by an attribute, 
but this attribute (or attributes) are not named "dir", and/or their 
values are not named "rtl", "ltr",...

3) XML or XML-like documents where certain fields (appearing scattered 
throughout the document) are RTL by default or by definition, and where 
adding a dir='rtl' attribute on each of them would be overkill.

So the summary is "You shouldn't use this unless you're an UA or you're 
really exactly sure of what you're doing."

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Monday, 26 September 2016 07:23:14 UTC