RE: DOCBOOK: Attributes for text direction and language

["HAMILTON,DICK (HP-FtCollins,ex1)" <dick_hamilton at hp dot com>]

This is what I get for dabbling in things I'm not
fully conversant in.  Following up on Chris's email
I checked with one of the unicode org's engineers,
who pointed me to another unicode report titled:
Unicode in XML and other Markup Languages.  It can
be found at: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr20/

This report recommends that in XML markup, explicit
markup be used in place of the unicode bidi embedding
controls.  The engineer I spoke with emphasized that
you only add these markups when necessary to override
behavior of the bidi algorithm. Otherwise, just let  
the implicit bidi do its thing.

Sorry for leading us into the weeds and thanks
to Chris for leading us back.

Dick

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher R. Maden [mailto:crism@maden.org]
> Sent: Monday, June 17, 2002 7:28 PM
> To: docbook@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: DOCBOOK: Attributes for text direction and language
> 
> 
> 
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> At 17:23 17/6/02, HAMILTON,DICK (HP-FtCollins,ex1) wrote:
> >I just took at look at the unicode bidirectional algorithm
> >as described in: http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr9/.
> >It is very complex and I don't claim to understand it in its
> >full glory, but there are codes that provide explicit directional
> >information, and the handling of numbers is covered in some
> >detail in the algorithm.  I can't say for sure if it will handle
> >what you're doing, but since Hebrew was explicitly considered in
> >the development of the algorithm, I think there's a good chance
> >it will do what you need (if browsers and stylesheets use the
> >algorithm).
> 
> Embedding the bidi-override characters directly in your 
> content would be a 
> bad idea.  Those are really only for text-only use; when you have a 
> semantic layer (such as SGML or XML), it's much better to use that.
> 
> DocBook probably should add the equivalent of HTML's BDO 
> elements or global 
> dir attribute; in the meantime, you could use a generic 
> <phrase> with a 
> role attribute.
> 
> ~Chris
> - -- 
> Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, crism consulting
> DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
> <URL: http://crism.maden.org/consulting/ >
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