Specs handling text direction

Activity Streams

Notes

• this is JSON
• it's sent as single items
• structured objects
• only some strings are natural language
• includes a mechanism for localised text
• name property has no markup
• summary and others do support HTML markup
• an object can contains several natural language strings, which may have different base directions
• either a summaryMap should become several objects, or FS will need to be used
• the name property admits no markup, so control codes need to be used - otherwise, use markup for inline changes

Current solution proposed by WG:

for the name property (no markup allowed) add control codes at start and end of value for overall base direction and inline control codes for inline changes

Example 133

{
  "@context": {
    "@value": "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "@language": "he"
  },
  "name": "פעילות הבינאום, W3C",
  "type": "Note",
  "summary": "פעילות הבינאום, W3C"
}

for summary and content properties, use markup with dir attributes to establish overall base direction and inline changes

Example 134

{
  "@context": {
    "@value": "http://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams",
    "@language": "he"
  },
  "name": "פעילות הבינאום, W3C",
  "type": "Note",
  "summaryMap": {
    "en": "A simple <em>note</em>",
    "es": "Una <em>nota</em> sencilla",
    "he": "פעילות הבינאום, W3C"
  }
}

Problems

• can't expect users to add control characters or markup for default direction for every natural language string
• users are expected to use different approaches for notes vs summary/content, which is confusing
• all the usual problems with control codes (eg. difficult to use, may not be available on keyboard, even harder to edit, etc.)

Alternative suggestions

• specify that the default is LTR
• use one property per object to establish the base direction for RTL text
• user only needs to revert to RLM/LRM only for exceptional text
• if property value says auto, does FS analysis
• setting a property is possibly more helpful when dealing with input from HTML forms, etc, where the direction information is carried separately from the text (dirname)