Re: Atom Bidi Draft Update - Informal Last Call

[James M Snell <jasnell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yep. I'm aware of this side effect.  The question is whether or not this
 is an issue.  It basically is going to come down to defaults; that is,
if no direction is specified, and the direction cannot be determined
from some other means, can I safely assume a default value of "ltr".. in
which case, I can specify dir="rtl" at the feed level, and throw in a
dir="ltr" on entries that otherwise did not have any directionality
specified.  If that is an acceptable behavior (which I think it might
be) then there is no problem dropping the empty string value.  If it is
not an acceptable behavior, then we need the empty string value.

- James

James Holderness wrote:
> 
> James M Snell wrote:
>> peaceable_whale@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>>> From the example, I am not sure what the feed author wants. So far
>>>> there are only two directionalities allowed, left-to-right and
>>>> right-to-left. In the example, the directionality of atom:entry is
>>>> "rtl", there is no reason for the author to reset the directionality
>>>> with an empty string. He should either change the directionality to
>>>> "ltr" in atom:content or keep "rtl" by not using any "dir" attribute
>>>> in atom:content.
>>
>> Fair enough.  Removing dir="" requires that the feed publisher always
>> explicitly set the direction.  It simplifies processing and helps to
>> eliminate guessing.  Those are compelling enough reasons.  In the next
>> iteration I'll remove the blank value.
> 
> What would a planet feed do when aggregating content from other feeds
> that may not have explicit directionality? If I'm understanding things
> correctly, you would lose the ability to use the dir attribute on the
> root of the feed, because there would be no way of overriding it for
> feed items whose directionality was unknown.
> 
> Not that that's the end of the world. I just want to be sure that you
> realise you'd be losing that functionality.
> 
> Regards
> James
> 
>