Tuesday, October 3, 2006, 12:20:01 AM, James Snell wrote:

> I think the suggestion of adding a dir attribute is a very good idea.
> The great thing is that it can be done without any significant backwards
> compatibility concerns.  The definition of the attribute is simple enough:

>   atomCommonAttributes =
>       attribute xml:base { atomUri }?,
>       attribute xml:lang { atomLanguageTag }?,
>       attribute dir { "rtl" | "ltr" }?,
>       undefinedAttribute*


In the context of Atom, what's the problem with the Unicode bidi
control characters?

I suspect that browsers and standard OS text input widgets have better
support for Unicode bidi, than they do for a currently non-existing
Atom attribute.

Which elements would this help?

  content, subtitle, summary, rights and title support HTML, so this
  wouldn't be necessary for them.

  updated, published, logo, id, and icon I would guess can cope
  without.

  extensions are responsible for their own namespace, I don't think
  that we need to say what attributes can appear on an extension.


I think [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], and [EMAIL PROTECTED] are the only
attributes that would really benefit.

Wouldn't Unicode bidi be more powerful than a single direction
element, that would restrict the field to a single direction?

As we depend on Unicode, then we can't really stop people from using
Unicode bidi. We can't stop people from using HTML/XHTML bidi. Or even
CSS bidi controls. I think we should think carefully before we
introduce yet another method for bidi text.  Especially one that will
be incompatible with all existing Atom consumers.


-- 
Dave

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