> The guidelines state, very clearly, that the formatting characters > should not be used when markup can be used instead.
But markup cannot be used inside XML attributes. Read "Best Practice 11". It describes our situation exactly: <http://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/tech-bidi.html#ri20030728.092841697> [...] On the other hand, attribute text and element text that allows no internal markup, ie. the title, textarea and option elements, cannot support use of dir on a span or other element to label part of its content. In these cases you can use Unicode characters to do the same job. The following table shows correspondences between markup and Unicode control codes: [...] RLE LRE RLO LRO PDF [...] The joint Unicode Technical Report #20 and W3C Note, Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages goes further. It explicitly recommends that only the markup be used [...] Of course, in attribute values or for the three elements listed above markup cannot be used, so the Unicode control characters are the only option available. Do you disagree with these findings? Do you have a better way to implement bidi embedding in attribute values or PCDATA elements? The atom-bidi draft does not support bidi embedding. If you are representing bidi text in a scope that supports internal markup you can either use Unicode or mixed content markup; and mixed content markup is the prefered choice. If you are representing bidi text in a scope that does not support internal markup - which is what we are discussing here - then Unicode is the only choice. -- Dave
