Correct alignment inheritance behavior for dir="rtl"

I am trying to determine the proper alignment behavior for a page that has
dir="rtl" (right to left language) in the opening HTML tag. I have created a
test case at:

http://www.mattwright.com/aligntest.html

In my opinion, on this test page all of the table elements should be aligned
left and right, with nothing in the center, (which is how it is displayed in
IE). However, both Firefox and Opera place the second 'bar' right aligned in
the left table cell.  Can anyone here confirm which is proper behavior
according to specs? I am trying to decide whether to open a bug regarding
this issue in Bugzilla.

To summarize: when you have dir="rtl", it reverses the table cell order and
defaults to right alignment. If you place a table inside of a <td
align="left"></td> cell, that table ignores the alignment in both Firefox
and Opera.  However, in a dir="ltr" situation, where a table is inside of a
<td align="right"></td>, the table does not ignore the alignment. I don't
see why changing the direction of text should affect whether a table
inherits the alignment attribute.

Sorry if this is off-topic, one of the Mozilla developers recommended I ask
this list what the proper behavior should be.

Thanks,

Matt Wright

Received on Tuesday, 17 May 2005 02:17:09 UTC