85987 - English text reversed on visual hebrew page with dir=ltr

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, defect)

Description

[Tzafrir Cohen]

The sample page has dir=rtl set in the html tag, and encoding set to visual
hebrew (iso-8859-8). English text in that page is reversed.

The behaviour of dir=rtl is not exactly well-defined with visual (say,
ISO-8859-8) pages.

However, reversing the English does not seem like a resonable idea: why should
english text get reversed?

And FWIW, this is not the behaviour of MSIE.

Comment 1

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

Can you tell me which version of IE you use?
I compared the current (6/15/2001) Mozilla windows build 
and IE 5.05. They showed exactly the same directioality, i.e.
RTL on your test page.

> However, reversing the English does not seem like 
> a resonable idea: why should english text get reversed?

It seems to me that this is because you have "dir=rtl" in 
your test page. How else should we display it? Mozilla
cannot know what language scirpt it is. It only sees
some byte sequence and then it has to parse "dir=rtl". 

Please look at tje fllowing HTML 4.01 spec:

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.2

Please us why you think this is a bug given the 
above spec of "dir".

Comment 2

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

I am going to confirm this bug based on a mail message
I received from tzafrir, who promised to write in his
comments in this bug in response to my comments above. 

Comment 3

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

The treatment of visual pages in the current Bidi code is based on the following
passage in the HTML spec:

'The value "ISO-8859-8" implies that the document is formatted visually,
misusing some markup (such as TABLE with right alignment and no line wrapping)
to ensure reasonable display on older user agents that do not handle
bidirectionality. Such documents do not conform to the present specification. If
necessary, they can be made to conform to the current specification (and at the
same time will be displayed correctly on older user agents) by adding BDO markup
where necessary.'

In other words (and I agree that this is open to interpretation) visual Hebrew
with dir=rtl is equivalent to logical Hebrew with the addition of <bdo dir=rtl>
on each block element, so it is correct to reverse English text. The only other
option which makes sense, IMO, is to ignore the dir attribute altogether on
visual pages, and in that case there would be no possibility of expressing
right-to-left visual text, which would be unfortunate.

Which version of MSIE are you testing on, BTW? The 5.x version I have displays
this page identically with Mozilla.

Comment 4

[Tzafrir Cohen]

OK. Simon's comments seem to give some reasoning to this behaviour. I agree with it.

And checking again, MSIE 5.0 does indeed behave the same.

Comment 5

[Simon Montagu :smontagu]

Resolving as INVALID based on tzafrir's last comment

Comment 6

[Katsuhiko Momoi]

Gilad, please verify the resolution.

Comment 7

[Uri Bernstein]

*** Bug 299399 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***