It's not clear to me whether the bdo tag is supposed to also influence
attribute values e.g titles on the bdo tag itself and/or on any
enclosed tags.
There have been suggestions for writing Hebrew fragments so that they
work both on older, non-rtl-supporting browsers, as also on new ones,
by coding something like this:
<bdo dir="ltr" lang="he">תבש</bdo>
and Mozilla of course displays the content as intended. However, if we
assign a title attribute to this:
<bdo dir="ltr" lang="he"
title="תבש">תבש</bdo>
the title is displayed back-to-front in the popup, evidently because
the letters have inherent rtl directionality and the bdo is having no
effect on them. The same if it's coded as:
<bdo dir="ltr" lang="he"><span
title="תבש">תבש</span></bdo>
with the attribute thoroughly enclosed within the bdo element.
Obviously, an author could respond by simply writing the title the
other way around, but one worries that it might one day be decided
that this is a bug and needs to be fixed; then it seems this would be
one sure way of authoring it:
<span title="שבת"><bdo dir="ltr"
lang="he">תבש</bdo></span>
putting the title outside of any possible bdo influence.
It says in
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/...g.html#h-8.2.4
that bdo "specifies the base direction of the element's text content",
which makes it clear what's meant to happen with the marked-up text
itself. But it doesn't explicitly address what happens to text
attributes in the markup. Are we to assume that such an effect is
excluded, or is it an open question?
See this in context near the middle of this sample page
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/...ir-sample.html
Feel free to rate me as pedantic for bringing this up, but it came
up in a recent discussion, and I thought I'd mention it somewhere
mozilla-ish.
best regards
