Re: background-position and bidi in CSS 2.1

Simetrical wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 3:15 PM, Andrew Fedoniouk
> <news@terrainformatica.com> wrote:
>> Sorry but there is *absolutely* no way in CSS2.1/3 to say
>> something like this now:
>>
>> ul:ltr { padding-left:2em; }
>> ul:rtl { padding-right:2em; }
> 
> MediaWiki "solves" this by just tacking a class "rtl" or "ltr" on to
> the body, depending on direction.  This wouldn't work so easily for
> sites that need to intermix directionalities on one page to arbitrary
> nesting levels, of course, but I'd imagine those are less common.  (It
> also conditionally includes an extra stylesheet for RTL, but that's
> not actually necessary.)
> 
> Not that I'm against the feature, but it can be done in practice right
> now by chucking in extra classes at the application/author level.  As
> with most selector-related things.  :)
> 

If you design the whole site then - yes, you probably can do something 
by declaring class names implicitly. But even in MediaWiki you can
insert rtl text inside ltr block that is by itself in rtl
environment and so on.

If you is a supplier of components that are used on someone's pages
then you have no way to make modular styles.

I personally stumbled on this issue when I tried to define
system of default styles for HTML like here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/sample.html

Note this block:

ol, ul, dir, menu, dd  { margin-left: 40px }

But there is no :rtl counterpart of it so the
whole sample is useless as it does not reflect
of what UAs are doing.


-- 
Andrew Fedoniouk.

http://terrainformatica.com

Received on Sunday, 14 December 2008 22:22:54 UTC