DOCBOOK: Re: Attributes for text direction and language

[Tsuguya Sasaki <ts at ts-cyberia dot net>]

Christopher R. Maden:

> 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.

Norman Walsh:

> I think Chris is probably right. No one (as far as I know) on the
> committee has extensive experience with bidi so we probably
> believed that language was sufficient.
>
> What I would really like are some (reasonably short) examples
> that demonstrate (all of) the problems for which there is insufficient
> markup.

It seems to me that the rationale for the inclusion of the bdo
element and the dir attribute in HTML/XHTML may also hold
true of DocBook for its internationalization. Cf. HTML 4.01
Specification, 8.2 Specifying the direction of text and tables,
for examples:
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.2

Tsuguya Sasaki
http://www.ts-cyberia.net/