Re: Atom bidi attribute, empty string value

["Franklin Tse" <peaceable_whale@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Yes.. but they're not asking those processors to do anything more than
> what is currently already required.

If developers of aggregators want to use dir="", I will be fine. But the use of dir="" in normal feed should be strongly discouraged... feed authors should specify the text direction...

> This is a spec bug.  I had meant to change that to:
> 
>  ... user agents MAY perform direction guessing in documents where the
>  base direction is unspecified but they SHOULD NOT do so when a "dir"
>  attribute value of "ltr" or "rtl" is provided.
> 
> This will allow user agents to apply whatever heuristics it wants to
> determine the base directionality where the dir is unspecified.
> 
> I will fix this in another iteration.

"in elements" may be better than "in documents" if direction guessing is allowed when dir="" is used in an element and inherited.

>> PS: In the example above, if the second entry comes from a source feed that does not contain any "xml:lang" attribute or "dir", aggregators have to generate xml:lang=""[1][2] and dir="" together. (<entry xml:lang="" dir=""></entry>). It is very problematic if only dir="" is generated.
>> 
> 
> Yep. Not sure if this needs to be discussed in this doc, however.

Um... if your draft has a section called "Relation with the xml:lang attribute", then that should be discussed.

By the way, dir="default" or dir="unknown" seems clearer than dir="".

Franklin