[whatwg] bidi embedding for block-level elements

[fantasai]

On 01/14/2010 12:49 AM, Simon Montagu wrote:
> On 01/11/2010 11:35 PM, fantasai wrote:
>> On 11/26/2009 10:54 PM, Simon Montagu wrote:
>>>
>>> I assume your Gecko example is using a very recent version of Gecko,
>>> such as a nightly build or a beta of Firefox 3.6? I fixed this issue
>>> only a few months ago.
>>>
>>> The HTML standard does specify what to do in this case, see
>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#style-bidi:
>>>
>>> "When a block element that does not have a dir attribute is transformed
>>> to the style of an inline element by a style sheet, the resulting
>>> presentation should be equivalent, in terms of bidirectional formatting,
>>> to the formatting obtained by explicitly adding a dir attribute
>>> (assigned the inherited value) to the transformed element."
>>>
>>> In practice, however, since browsers are not consistent, authors will
>>> have to use CSS properties to achieve the expected results.
>>
>> Does this mean applying "unicode-bidi: embed" to all block-level
>> elements?
>> Because that seems like it fulfill those requirements.
>
> I was thinking in terms of applying "unicode-bidi: embed" ad hoc
> whenever applying "display: inline" to a specific element, but applying
> it wholesale to all block-level elements will also work, of course.

In that case, I suggest the we add it to the sample default style sheet for
HTML 4 in the CSS2.1 appendix, and recommend the HTMLWG add some wording
about block-level elements defining bidi embedding boundaries to the HTML5
spec (and perhaps using CSS's "unicode-bidi: embed" rule as an example).

~fantasai