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Re: xml:lang attribute




Ziv Caspi wrote:
Evan Martin said:

The one fundamentally useful application I can see is having the
aggregator understand that RTL languages need to be wrapped in a
<div dir="rtl">.  But as you pointed out, entries with multiple
languages will need that markup within them anyway...

It's more than this. Other Atom elements need to have some mechanism to indicate direction, because aggregators will most likely try to "stitch" the metadata together with the content. Consider, for example, an aggregator that displays the <title> before the actual content -- you'd want the title to be right-justified if it's primarily in RTL language.

Where I suspect this is heading:


In every element that contains displayable text, there will someday be a desire to insert markup in the text. We can try to legislate against it, and perhaps even add a few heuristics in the validator, but it is inevitable.

The best we can do is provide a means by which the producers unambiguously declare their intent in the markup, and encourage them to use it.

Ziv Caspi
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