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Subject: Draft proposal for dir attribute
Hi all, Here's my draft proposal for the dir attribute. I'd appreciate review feedback via email before Monday's SC meeting so we can try closing this item on Monday to hand off to the DITA TC. It's a working draft that I hope will invoke input from the SC members. Based on feedback I receive, I plan to prepare a closer to final draft before Monday's meeting. I think the main questions are: 1. Should dir be a universal attribute or not? 2. Should we support dir="ltr|rtl" or dir="ltr|rtl|lro|rlo" as per HTML 4.0? Any and all feedback will be greatly appreciated. Best Regards, Gershon --- Gershon L Joseph Member, OASIS DITA and DocBook Technical Committees Director of Technology and Single Sourcing Tech-Tav Documentation Ltd. office: +972-8-974-1569 mobile: +972-57-314-1170 http://www.tech-tav.comTitle: Dir Attribute Proposal
While most languages are written in a text from from left to right, Hebrew and many Arabic languages are written from right to left. In some languages, including Hebrew, numbers and other content is written left to right. Also, a multilingual document containing, for example, English and Hebrew, contains some text that flows left to right and other text that flows right to left. Text direction cannot be sufficiently specified by the xml:lang attribute alone, because numeric and punctuation characters are input, and rendered, according to the current text flow direction (LTR or RTL). From the HTML 4.0 spec:
Add a new attribute called "dir", as follows: dir="ltr|rtl" This attribute specifies the base direction of the element's text content. This direction overrides the inherent directionality of characters as defined in Unicode Standard Annex #9: The Bidirectional Algorithm. This attribute must be universally available on all elements (add to %univ-atts;?). There are some elements for which dir does not apply, such as:
Should we keep dir universal and document it's not relevant on <image> (less work) or add dir everywhere except where it does not make sense (more work?) Additional rules to be documented:
Example: <p dir="ltr"> The Hebrew word for "Hebrew" is <ph xml:lang="he-il">עברית</ph>, but since Hebrew letters have intrinsic right-to-left directionality, I had to type the word starting from the letter "ע", i.e. <ph xml:lang="he-il" dir="ltr">עברית</ph>. </p> |
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