The attribute is optional and has three possible values, "ltr", "rtl" and "" (representing 'unspecified'). If the attribute is missing,
How about also allowing the values "lro" and "rlo" as used in xhtml2. [1]
Any element defined by this specification MAY have a "dir" attribute whose content specifies the base direction of directionally-neutral text
I was looking through the various Atom elements that this might apply to and the one thing that struck me as problematic was the atom:category element. Would the dir attribute apply to the term, the label, both, neither? Is that one of the cases where you should just use unicode control characters?
Perhaps it would be better to limit the dir attribute to element content in general. Even for elements that only have one "text" attribute, you can never be sure that other attributes won't be added in the future. For example in atom:link you would think the direction would unambiguously apply to the title attribute, but say a future revision or extension added a description attribute - suddenly it's not so obvious anymore.
Regards James [1] http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml2/mod-bidi.html
