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

[Paul Grosso <pgrosso at arbortext dot com>]

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.

paul

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#adef-dir
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#edef-BDO
[3] http://www.w3.org/TR/xsl/slice6.html#fo_bidi-override