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Subject: FW: Offer of advice
From: Ray Lam [mailto:raymond.lam@blastradius.com] Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2006 11:09 PM To: Paul Prescod; gershon@tech-tav.com Cc: JoAnn Hackos Subject: RE: Offer of advice Gershon and I did discuss the
use of the xml:lang attribute for inferring directionality, and it seems to me
that xml:lang could be useful for basic support of the bidi algorithm, but it
may break down if it was used to handle the more complex cases of bidirectional
text.
For instance, there might be cases where
the default embedding level may not be equivalent to that of the language. For
instance, in a primarily Arabic document there might be a single paragraph
that is predominantly English (starts and ends in English, but with some Arabic
content nested within), but the author of the article wishes the default
embedding level to be right-to-left so that it flows consistently with the rest
of the article, then an xml:lang attribute of "English" on that paragraph will
contradict with the wishes of the author. Using a dir attribute of rtl would
meet his particular needs.
Also, the use of the xml:lang by itself may
not be sufficient to determine directionality. Numeric sequences for instance
are still rendered left-to-right in languages like Hebrew and Arabic, and an
xml:lang setting of "Hebrew" would still impose a burden on the processor to
understand that numeric runs would be rendered in a direction counter to the
natural direction of the language. Tagging these numeric sequences with an
xml:lang of "English" or another left-to-right language just to get
left-to-right rendering would seem counter-intuitive to me.
One other thing, xml:lang does not have the
notion of directional overrides - probably arguable how useful this
feature actually may be - but nonetheless a feature of the bidi
algorithm that would be difficult to reproduce using just the xml:lang
attribute.
So, in my opinion, the use of the xml:lang attribute will probably
be useful for translation purposes and possibly for basic support of
directionality, but I believe that using the dir attribute will be a cleaner,
more powerful and more explicit means for specifying directionality.
Ray From: Paul Prescod Sent: Thu 16/03/2006 11:29 AM To: Ray Lam; gershon@tech-tav.com Cc: JoAnn Hackos Subject: FW: Offer of advice I think you two know each other already! I don't have time to
participate in all of these discussions but Ray knows what requirements we came
up with based on our conversations with customers, partners and experts and may
have some thoughts to contribute on the discussions. |
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