[whatwg] textContent and bidi

Tue Feb 12 17:46:36 PST 2008

On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, fantasai wrote:
> 
> BTW, for 'dir', I think the inheritance behavior should be a little more 
> clearly specified:
> 
> # If the attribute is omitted or has another value, then the directionality
> # is unchanged.
> 
> Unchanged from what?

This changed a while ago to say "same as its parent".

> You should specify that the initial value (i.e. what <html> gets in the 
> absence of any other declarations) is ltr.

Done.

> You should also somehow make a reference (either directly or indirectly) 
> to UAX 9. Your text doesn't anywhere specify what "directionality" 
> means. The closest we get is an example referencing CSS2.1's sample 
> style sheet. Saying only that the processing layer is responsible for 
> handling the 'dir' attribute not only doesn't give enough information 
> about what is expected, it also doesn't normatively require use of the 
> Unicode bidi algorithm rather than some other bidi algorithm. (Other 
> bidi algorithms do exist.)

It's not clear to me what would need to be defined. Is there some reason 
that a UA couldn't use another bidi algorithm?

> # For example, CSS 2.1 defines a mapping from this attribute to the CSS 
> # 'direction' and 'unicode-bidi' properties
> 
> s/defines/suggests/
>
> The sample style sheet is informative. The only normative text about 
> handling 'dir' in CSS2.1 is a sentence that says bidi behavior in HTML 
> is defined by the HTML 4 specification.

It does define the mapping, whether its normative or not.

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