RE: DOCBOOK: Attributes for text direction and language

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

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At 17:23 17/6/02, HAMILTON,DICK (HP-FtCollins,ex1) wrote:
>I just took at look at the unicode bidirectional algorithm
>as described in: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/.
>It is very complex and I don't claim to understand it in its
>full glory, but there are codes that provide explicit directional
>information, and the handling of numbers is covered in some
>detail in the algorithm.  I can't say for sure if it will handle
>what you're doing, but since Hebrew was explicitly considered in
>the development of the algorithm, I think there's a good chance
>it will do what you need (if browsers and stylesheets use the
>algorithm).

Embedding the bidi-override characters directly in your content would be a 
bad idea.  Those are really only for text-only use; when you have a 
semantic layer (such as SGML or XML), it's much better to use that.

DocBook probably should add the equivalent of HTML's BDO elements or global 
dir attribute; in the meantime, you could use a generic <phrase> with a 
role attribute.

~Chris
- -- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, crism consulting
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
<URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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