Internationalization Comments on HTML5
Version reviewed: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
Lead reviewer and date of initial review: Various, 2008
Subject lead in: [HTML5]
This is an ongoing review of early drafts of the HTML5 specification. Since there is not dated version of the draft, comments are not tied to a particular dated version of the specification. This may mean that links to relevant parts of the document can no longer be followed at some point. Unlike most reviews, this table serves as a collection point for issues raised over an indefinite period of time, rather than a review of a specific dated version in a particular timeframe. Some of these comments have not yet been endorsed by the I18N Core WG. Others are comments on behalf of the Internationalization Core WG, unless otherwise stated. The means of identifying which is which is still TBD. The "Owner" column indicates who has been assigned the responsibility of tracking discussions on a given comment.
We recommend that responses to the comments in this table use a separate email for each point. This makes it far easier to track threads. Click on the icons in the right-most column to see email discussions.
| ID | Location | Subject | Comment | Owner | Ed. / Subs. |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 3.4.4 | Rendering bidi without a style sheet |
"The processing of this attribute depends on the presentation layer. For example, CSS 2.1 defines a mapping from this attribute to the CSS 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties, and defines rendering in terms of those properties." We think that HTML 5, like HTML 4, should be able to render bidirectional text without a style sheet. It would break backwards compatibility to remove the ability of a browser to do so without CSS. Therefore in our opinion, HTML 5 has to describe the expected behavior in at least the detail of HTML 4 rather than leave it up to the "presentation layer". Note that we do not want to impose a requirement on implementations of HTML 5 to implement CSS, but you could describe the expected behaviour by just referencing CSS and defining a default stylesheet fragment. This would just mean that an HTML 5 implementation has to make things behave as if it used this CSS default stylesheet fragment |
TBD | S | ||
| 2 | 3.12.21 | bdo element doesn't leave rendering up to presentation layer |
"If the element has the dir attribute set to the exact value ltr, then for the purposes of the bidi algorithm, the user agent must act as if there was a U+202D LEFT-TO-RIGHT OVERRIDE character at the start of the element, and a U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING at the end of the element." "If the element has the dir attribute set to the exact value rtl, then for the purposes of the bidi algorithm, the user agent must act as if there was a U+202E RIGHT-TO-LEFT OVERRIDE character at the start of the element, and a U+202C POP DIRECTIONAL FORMATTING at the end of the element." The section about the <bdo> element does *not* leave the expected behavior completely up to the presentation layer - which is confusing. Content authors need to know if they should use CSS, if CSS would override the specified behavior etc. |
TBD | S | ||
| 3 | 3.4.4 | Add note about using bidi constructs in content |
We propose that you add a note making clear that using the directional markup provided by HTML5 is is better than attaching CSS styling to arbitrary markup such as <p> etc., since information encoded in this way will apply to the content whether the CSS is used or not. |
TBD | E | ||
| 4 | 3.4.4 | Add rlo and lro values to dir |
Please consider allowing two new attribute values for the "dir" attribute: 'rlo' and 'lro' for dir. You do not need to remove the bdo element, but the new values will allow content authors to proceed to a scenario we described in the ITS 1.0 specification, It will also provide some additional power to the authors, since they will be able to attach dir="lro" to a block element. |
TBD | S |