Putting bullet to the right of a li and "direction"

[OJ]

Hey,

I'm trying to make a right justified, bullet on the right, list. The
only way that I've found is to use the "direction" attribute:
<style>
ul.rtl {
direction: rtl;
}
</style>
<ul class="rtl">
<li>test (test)</ul>
</ul>

This works, but the closing paren wants to render on the left side of
the line, so the render looks like this:
(test (test
although a copy and paste from the browser (IE 6.0) reveals it to be
this:
test (test)

I'm suprised it works, since I would have expected all the text to be
backwards, anyways, but I guess that's part of the algorhytm.

Anyhoo, can anyone point out a way to get this to render correctly?
Adding any character ("a-z", etc.) after the closing paren makes it
render the way I want.

Thanks!

oj

[Neal]

On 5 Nov 2004 06:29:04 -0800, OJ <or*******@aol. com> wrote:

This works, but the closing paren wants to render on the left side of
the line, so the render looks like this:
(test (test
although a copy and paste from the browser (IE 6.0) reveals it to be
this:
test (test)

What happens when you use ) in place of )?

[OJ]

Neal <ne*****@yahoo. com> wrote in message news:<op******* *******@news.in dividual.net>.. .

On 5 Nov 2004 06:29:04 -0800, OJ <or*******@aol. com> wrote:

This works, but the closing paren wants to render on the left side of
the line, so the render looks like this:
(test (test
although a copy and paste from the browser (IE 6.0) reveals it to be
this:
test (test)

What happens when you use ) in place of )?

Same thing.

[Berislav Lopac]

OJ wrote:

I'm trying to make a right justified, bullet on the right, list.

My suggestion is to set list-style: none, justify the list to right, and set
the bullet as a background image.

Berislav

[Alan J. Flavell]

On Fri, 5 Nov 2004, OJ wrote:

ul.rtl {
direction: rtl;
}
</style>
<ul class="rtl">
<li>test (test)</ul>
</ul>

This works, but the closing paren wants to render on the left side of
the line,
AFAICS that's because your Latin text is inherently ltr, and so it
comes out the correct way around by itself; but punctuation characters
such as parentheses mostly have neutral directionality, so they get
controlled by your rtl direction. You have to countermand that inside
of the individual list items to get the intended result.

Read http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/visuren.html#direction
I'm suprised it works, since I would have expected all the text to be
backwards, anyways,

No - read that CSS spec again. Particularly the bit about bidi
override and inline-level elements.

It looks to me as if one solution is to put the whole text inside a
<span>, and use that to countermand the directionality of the text
without upsetting the directionality of the <li> element. Trivial
test at:

http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/tests/rjlist.html

You can also do this in HTML with the dir= attribute - but you're
supposed to do that in HTML only to help to get the content correct
(for example, when you have mixed ltr and rtl writing in the same
piece of text[1]). Presentational effects (as it seems you want here)
are rightly delegated to CSS, as you are doing.

good luck

[1] for notes and samples, see
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...direction.html