Subject: Re: [atom-syntax] Atom bidi

From: James M Snell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 17 Oct 2006 09:09:08 -0700

Yves, thanks for the input, comments below.

Yves Savourel wrote:
> [snip]
> Atom could use just the local its:dir attribute and be ITS conformant.
> 

Ok. this is good to know.

> 
> I noticed the values described in atompub-bidi-00 include "" and default to it, while XHTML 1.0, XHTML 2.0, and ITS do not have ""
> and default to "ltr". Is there any specific reason to have "" and default to it?
> 

Currently Atom has no directionality metadata at all.  Implementations
cannot make any assumptions about the base directionality of the text.
Defaulting to "" preserves that case.  This extension spec cannot
reasonably say that the default directionality of text in an Atom feed
that doesn't use the u:dir attribute is LTR when there is nothing in
RFC4287 that backs up that claim.

- James