RE: [dita-translation] Draft proposal for dir attribute

["JoAnn Hackos" <joann.hackos@comtech-serv.com>]

Gershon, Ae you ready to submit a proposal for dir on Monday?

See my agenda plans.

JoAnn 

-----Original Message-----
From: Gershon L Joseph [mailto:gershon@tech-tav.com] 
Sent: Saturday, March 04, 2006 2:05 PM
To: 'Robert D Anderson'
Cc: bhertz@sdl.com; 'Bryan Schnabel'; 'Charles Pau'; 'Lieske,
Christian'; 'Dave A Schell'; dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org;
dpooley@sdl.com; 'Felix Sasaki'; 'Richard Ishida'; Jennifer Linton;
mambrose@sdl.com; patrickk@scriptware.nl; pcarey@lexmark.com;
Peter.Reynolds@lionbridge.com; rfletcher@sdl.com;
Sukumar.Munshi@lionbridge.com; tony.jewtushenko@productinnovator.com;
'Yves Savourel'
Subject: RE: [dita-translation] Draft proposal for dir attribute

1. I'm in agreement.

2. I think what I meant to write is if the document element does not
specify
dir or xml:lang, then assume LTR. I agree that if the document element
specifies xml:lang, the direction derived from the Unicode spec for the
specified language should prevail.

It appears that the lro and rlo values are intended to override the
default
Unicode directionality and are applicable mainly at the output rendering
stage (which is why they're in the HTML and XHTML specs). I believe we
can
omit them from DITA. Unless of course anyone else provides input that
proves
they are needed at the authoring stage...


Best Regards,
Gershon


-----Original Message-----
From: Robert D Anderson [mailto:robander@us.ibm.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 12:58 AM
To: gershon@tech-tav.com
Cc: bhertz@sdl.com; 'Bryan Schnabel'; Charles Pau; 'Lieske, Christian';
Dave
A Schell; dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org; dpooley@sdl.com; 'Felix
Sasaki'; 'Richard Ishida'; 'Jennifer Linton'; mambrose@sdl.com;
patrickk@scriptware.nl; pcarey@lexmark.com;
Peter.Reynolds@lionbridge.com;
rfletcher@sdl.com; Sukumar.Munshi@lionbridge.com;
tony.jewtushenko@productinnovator.com; 'Yves Savourel'
Subject: Re: [dita-translation] Draft proposal for dir attribute

Hello again -- only two short comments on the dir attribute.

1. As the one currently responsible for maintaining and bug-fixing the
DTDs,
I would strongly favor making it a universal attribute, rather than
adding
it to almost everything.

2. One of the points in the write-up says:
"If the document element does not specify the dir attribute, assume left
to
right (ltr). "
The previous bullet says that inline elements use the "specified
language's
default text direction". Wouldn't that be the case for the document as
well?
That is, if I indicate xml:lang="he-il" on my root topic element, then
everything in the topic (such as tables, notes, and lists) should
default to
dir="rtl" unless otherwise specified.

I do not know about the lro and rlo values -- does anybody here have
tool
experience that would indicate whether these are still needed? If tools
still require them, then we should probably add them.

Robert D Anderson