DOCBOOK: Re: bidi override thoughts

[Norman Walsh <ndw at nwalsh dot com>]

/ Paul Grosso <pgrosso@arbortext.com> was heard to say:
| At 18:45 2002 08 20 -0400, Norman Walsh wrote:
|
|>|    573419 Add bidirectional text overrides
|>
|>Add bdo everywhere?
|>
|>ACTION: Paul to investigate what the content model needs to be and why simply
|>        using a nested phrase is insufficient.
[...]
| If so, then I note that phrase is defined as part of %gen.char.class; 
| which is part of %para.char.mix; and that the declaration for phrase is:
|
| <!ELEMENT phrase (%para.char.mix;)*>
|
| It sure sounds like this would allow us to use phrase to signal 
| bidi-override if that's what we want to do.

That might be better than adding another element.

| The phrase element currently has common attributes and a role attribute.
| That appears to leave us the option of just using the role attribute
| to trigger bidi-override

Actually, we (the TC) can't do that. We have explicitly promised never
to touch role so that other users and implementors are free to use it
locally without upgrade worries.

| or adding another attribute especially for
| triggering the bidi-override semantic.  I don't think there is any
| need for further options to bidi-override, so if we add a new attribute,
| it would just be a "boolean" attribute.

Well, for consistency with HTML, and so that moving something from one
context to another doesn't inadvertantly "flip" the direction, I think
I'd be inclined to give it values of "left-to-right" and
"right-to-left" rather than just make it boolean.

                                        Be seeing you,
                                          norm

-- 
Norman Walsh <ndw@nwalsh.com>      | That which we call sin in others,
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ | is experiment for us.--Emerson
Chair, DocBook Technical Committee |