Re: bidirectionality with white-space collapsing

Richard,

ok, although I liked the wording of Mark's cautionary note rather than saying
"in general it is best..."

Also, I took the wording about not creating a new embedding level to be a
reference to the recommendation elsewhere that bidi embedding not be driven
from CSS and only managed by inline markup. As you know during the FTF Najib
and I couldn't see the justification for this. It wasn't a comment specific to
white space collapsing, but the wording being used here.

Also, I didn't see the mail that started this in recent days. It must go back a
ways or perhaps I missed some recent mails?
tex


Richard Ishida wrote:
> 
> > Richard Ishida wrote:
> > >
> > > The last line of
> > > http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-CSS21-20030915/text.html#q9
> > says "This is
> > > best avoided by using the natural bidirectionality of characters
> > > instead of explicit embedding levels."
> > >
> > > My view is the following (also expressed perhaps slightly too
> > > succinctly in the FAQ
> > >
> > http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-space.html
> > that gave
> > > rise to the section in the CSS spec):
> > >
> > > 1. As a general principle it is best to put white space on
> > the outside
> > > of markup rather immediately inside (ie. "XXX <markup>YYY</markup>
> > > ZZZZ" is better than "XXX<markup> YYY </markup>ZZZZ" or
> > "XXX <markup>
> > > YYY </markup> ZZZZ"); and such an approach would solve the problem
> > > here.
> >
> >
> > I don't think you can say this "solve's the problem better"
> 
> But I'm not saying that.  Read more carefully and you'll see that I'm
> stating that *in general* it is best to avoid spaces on the inside of tags.
> Then I'm saying that such an approach happens to solve the problem here. I'm
> not saying that this is a better solution than that mentioned below, just an
> alternative.  I think you need to do one or the other, though.
> 
> > or that one approach is better than another in this instance.
> > If the problem is the span sets text-decoration:underline,
> > and you want the space underlined, the solution is to remove
> > the space ahead of the markup and keep the space inside.
> >
> > It should just make clear how it works, and the user needs to
> > decide what they are attempting to author.
> 
> > > 2. Also, *if* the required presentation would be achieved by the
> > > bidirectional algorithm alone, and without markup that
> > creates a new
> > > embedding level, then it is better to omit the directional
> > attribute
> > > from the markup or remove the markup altogether (depending
> > on how the
> > > markup is used) (which I think was what the CSS spec was trying to
> > > say). Eg. a single word in arabic or hebrew in an English sentence
> > > usually requires no markup to achieve the correct visual
> > ordering in
> > > an XHTML document. You may want to surround it by something like a
> > > span element to apply font styling, but you don't need the dir
> > > attribute.
> >
> > It is not clear to me that the statistics support this
> > statement. Although the majority of words and text end in
> > strong direction characters, there are many situations,
> > especially if the text ends in punctuation or parentheses,
> > where having direction is helpful.
> 
> Again, I'm only saying ***IF*** the bidirectional algorithm copes fine on
> its own.  If you have a need for the markup, this is not a good solution.
> 
> >I understand the
> > alternative to add a format where needed, but where is the
> > harm in associating direction with a style, given that not
> > only direction but many other aspects of style are associated
> > with language and many authors will create styles for
> > language, and it alleviates the need to examine the endings
> > of text runs and treat case by case.
> 
> See http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-bidi-css-markup.html
> 
> I'm not clear how using styles will provide a better solution for the case
> in hand.  You need markup to apply the styling, so you'd be forced to adopt
> the solution of removing internal spaces.
> 
> RI
> 
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > > Hope that helps,
> > > RI
> > >
> > > ============
> > > Richard Ishida
> > > W3C
> > >
> > > contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
> > >
> > > http://www.w3.org/International/
> > http://www.w3.org/International/geo/
> >
> > --
> >
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> > Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898  mailto:Tex at XenCraft.com
> > Xen Master         XenCraft           http://www.XenCraft.com
> > Making e-Business Work Around the World
> > -------------------------------------------------------------
> >

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898  mailto:Tex at XenCraft.com
Xen Master         XenCraft           http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------

Received on Wednesday, 10 March 2004 08:06:45 UTC