FW: RE: Proposal: new "auto" value for the "direction" property

> [Original Message]
> From: Simon Montagu <smontagu@smontagu.org>
>
> The current values of "rtl" and "ltr" for the "direction" property can 
> produce unexpected results in situations where the content of an element 
> can be either right-to-left or left-to-right text. See for example 
> http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=224685, especially comment 4.
>
> For such situations it would be useful to have a value "auto", 
> indicating that the direction depends on the intrinsic direction of the 
> content. To determine the direction, the UA should use the algorithm 
> described in rules P2 and P3 of the Unicode Bidi Algorithm at 
> http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr9/#P2

I can see what you are getting at, but the unexpected results crop
up because of the side effects that setting 'direction' has on other
CSS properties, and not so much on the bidirectionality of the text.
This will also be an issue primarily only for form elements where
the author cannot know what text will be displayed by the element.

I don't know what to think of this.  At the very least, a list of the
various
CSS properties that base default behavior on the value of 'direction'
should be compiled so that side effects from adding a new value for
'direction' can be evaluated before going ahead with the idea.

Received on Wednesday, 19 May 2004 08:47:11 UTC