[SVGMobile12] Lack of BIDI 'direction'

There's discussion in http://www.w3.org/TR/SVGMobile12/text.html about
bidirectional text, but there is no definition for a 'direction' property
that I can find, nor any mention of any substitute for it (such as a 'dir'
attribute).

This is a problem because the Unicode bidirectional algorithm needs a
base direction for each "paragraph" that it operates on. For plain text
it guesses based on the first character in the text, but this is not
always accurate. Applying this rule to SVG Tiny would be incompatible
with an implementation that supported SVG Tiny plus the 'direction'
property because 'direction' defaults to 'ltr', not to 'guess a direction'.

The lack of a 'direction' affects both bidi reordering and other properties
like 'text-align', whose values' behavior depends on 'direction'.

I therefore strongly recommend that SVG Tiny include the 'direction'
property.

~fantasai

Received on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 17:52:05 UTC