Re: DOCBOOK: bidi [was: DocBook Technical Committee Meeting Minutes:18 Feb 2003]

[Yann Dirson <ydirson at fr dot alcove dot com>]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2003 at 08:19:20AM -0600, Paul Grosso wrote:
> At 21:38 2003 02 18 -0600, Paul Grosso wrote:
> 
> >My very untutored understanding is that there are two key branches here:
> >
> >1.  There is markup delimiting the language change--whether it is
> >    specifically markup to "change language" or it is other markup
> >    such as "foobar-number" whose content is known to require a
> >    direction change (e.g., numbers in Hebrew are written left-to-right).
> >
> >    In this case, there is nothing more we need in the DTD. 
> 
> Actually, I mispoke here.  What we should probably do is
> add a "direction" attribute to the <phrase> element in
> a fashion somewhat parallel to what HTML allows [1].  I
> think <phrase> can be used for this purpose, but I suppose
> we could add a "bidi" element (along the lines of HTML's
> bdo element [2] or XSL-FO's bidi-override element [3]) if 
> we don't wish to use <phrase>.  Note that this element needs 
> to be able to nest within itself.

Is that necessary ?  Isn't possible to infer the writing direction
from the value of the "lang" attribute, without adding anything new ?

For special cases like the Hebrew numbers, what about going more
semantic and provide a "number" element ?

-- 
Yann Dirson <Yann dot Dirson at fr dot alcove dot com>                 http://www.alcove.com/
Technical support manager                Responsable de l'assistance technique
Senior Free-Software Consultant          Consultant senior en Logiciels Libres
Debian developer (dirson at debian dot org)                        Développeur Debian