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