Re: LANG as an attribute
James Clark (jjc@jclark.com)
Tue, 1 Aug 95 06:59:17 EDT
> Date: Mon, 31 Jul 95 18:22:01 EDT
> From: Jon_Bosak@Novell.COM
>
> [Tom Neff:]
>
> > 2. A browser for Hebrew or Chinese might well attempt, if it knows the
> > language is appropriate, to display text right-to-left or
> > top-to-bottom in future. Are there presentation issues or risks
> > inherent in allowing a character-level switch from, say, Hebrew to
> > Spanish and back?
>
> You bet. It's an implementation nightmare. It's not impossible, but
> people who have studied this tell me that it's not nearly as simple as
> it looks at first glance.
>
> This subject received a great deal of discussion (most of it before I
> became involved) in the DSSSL working group. I don't know all the
> details, but I do know that no one is expecting bidirectional
> capabilities in DSSSL-Lite.
I would expect it to be an optional feature in DSSSL-Lite just as it
is in DSSSL. It doesn't really matter: DSSSL-Lite is really not much
more than a set of conformance options for DSSSL, and DSSSL does have
bidi support. If DSSSL-Lite didn't include bidi support, then those
who wanted bidi support would just have to use the DSSSL-Lite subset
of DSSSL plus the optional DSSSL bidi feature.
James Clark
jjc@jclark.com