353087 - Feed preview needs to infer text direction (RTL) from feed language

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Graveyard :: RSS Discovery and Preview, defect, P5)

Description

[Robert Sayre]

a sad, but true, reality. Feeds in languages such as "he-IL" need to have their default text direction set to RTL, for text-only elements.

I've CCed drivers people because some of our default localized feeds are getting bitten by this bug.

Comment 1

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Inferring direction from language is an explicit MUST NOT in the HTML spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html#idx-lang_attribute-1

Comment 2

[David Baron :dbaron: (⌚️UTC-4, no longer working on Mozilla)]

What are the symptoms of this problem?  Could they be fixed by explicit embeddings?

Comment 3

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

It's a MUST NOT in HTML because HTML has options. Ignoring tiresome arguments about the intention of inadequate specs, RSS titles are plain text, not HTML.

The symptom is that the feed preview for http://www.haayal.co.il/xml/rss shows the HTML descriptions properly rtl, and the plain text descriptions ltr.

The best overview of the problem I've seen is http://www.cubicgarden.com/blojsom/blog/cubicgarden/xml/Semantic+web/2005/05/24/The_problem_with_Language_RSS.html from Ian Forrester, whose day job is (or at least was at the time) producing feeds like http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/persian/atom.xml which we fail to render rtl in preview because the xml:lang="fa" (which isn't covering enough of the feed) doesn't tip us off.

However, I don't think it's a 2.0 blocker, since our default localized feeds are the feeds least likely to ever see the preview page, and anyone who uses RSS and reads rtl is used to having things suck.

Comment 4

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

(In reply to comment #3)
> It's a MUST NOT in HTML because HTML has options. Ignoring tiresome arguments
> about the intention of inadequate specs, RSS titles are plain text, not HTML.

I don't have anything against using the directionality of the content to determine the text direction; that would be a dupe of bug 347510

Comment 5

[Robert Sayre]

Attachment: screenshot of IE7 feed with and without "he-IL" language tag

This attachment shows IE7 rendering a Hebrew feed with no <language> tag on the left side, and the same feed with <language>he-IL</language>.

(In reply to comment #4)
> 
> I don't have anything against using the directionality of the content to
> determine the text direction; that would be a dupe of bug 347510

I want to do the right thing, but where we have a choice, I want to be compatible with IE7. Take a look at the third item title in the screenshot. They get the text direction right, but the overall direction and alignment is wrong. Can we get it right without using <language> to set bidi values?

(In reply to comment #2)
> What are the symptoms of this problem?  

Busted titles in RTL feeds (wrong side of the page).

> Could they be fixed by explicit embeddings?

I am not sure I understand your question, but one possible solution I heard was to patch the RTL builds and fix the rest of them in 2.0.0.1. I don't know enough about Firefox release management to have an opinion.

Comment 6

[Robert Sayre]

Attachment: Bon Echo preview of the same Hebrew RTL feed

Here is Bon Echo previewing the same feed. Same as IE7 when no <language> value is available.

Comment 7

[Phil Ringnalda (:philor)]

Description of IE7's algo: http://blogs.msdn.com/rssteam/archive/2007/05/17/reading-feeds-in-right-to-left-order.aspx

Comment 8

[Robert Sayre]

Attachment: add xml:lang

this adds xml:lang support, need to mess with it a little bit to get RSS2 right.

Comment 9

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

OK, let's do this for interoperability, but please don't follow this part of IE's algo:
 "the language value must be in lowercase (e.g. ar-SA, he-IL, ur-PK, etc.)"

That is Just Wrong -- language tags are always case-insensitive (RFC 4646)

Comment 10

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Robert, what's the status here?  Will this make M8?  If you're still wrapped up in content-restriction, it can slide to M9

Comment 11

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Moving to M9 per discussion with sayrer.

Comment 12

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

moving out bugs that don't need to block b1

Comment 13

[(no longer active)]

Mass-assigning the new rtl keyword to RTL-related (see bug 349193).

Comment 14

[(no longer active)]

Robert, any status updates here?

Comment 16

[Mike Connor [:mconnor]]

Clearly sayrer isn't going to fix this.

Comment 17

[Robert Sayre]

hrmph

Comment 18

[ebrahim]

BUMP?

Comment 19

[(no longer active)]

Can't we use dir=auto here to address this?

Comment 20

[Marco Bonardo [:mak]]

The feed preview code has been removed by bug 1477669.