Text Directionality Draft Questions

These are some questions for readers of the Text Directionality Draft document (members of Council and of the Text Directionality Workgroup). Feel free to add comments and new questions.

Note that comments are also being made on the draft's talk page.

Is the draft written at the appropriate level of detail?

There may be way too much or way too little detail here.

At the simplest level, we could say "CSS Writing Modes and CSS Transforms provide properties and values for encoding text directionality and transformation. You may wish to use them in the TEI @style attribute, or in <rendition>/@rendition," and stop there. I think that would be unhelpful and unkind, since the CSS specifications are not really human-friendly, and there are some aspects of our suggested usage which is orthogonal to the way the specifications are addressed, since we're using the CSS properties descriptively rather than prescriptively.

On the other hand, you may feel that even more detail is required, with more and better examples. The examples for transforms, for example, are rudimentary and scarcely hint at the actual complexity of the CSS specification.

Where does this section belong in the Guidelines?

NOTE: At the Council meeting in Oxford in November, it was decided that this new section should be incorporated into a rewritten Chapter 5 (currently named "Languages and Character Sets"), along with section 10.6.6 from Chapter 10 ("Languages and Writing Systems").

Originally, I thought it should be added to the end of the "Languages and Character Sets" front matter section, but I no longer think so; the draft contains examples of TEI encoding which wouldn't make sense to someone who has not yet actually read the body of the Guidelines. Other possible locations would be 10.6.6 Languages and writing systems, or Chapter 5: Non-standard Characters and Glyphs (which would obviously have to be retitled). The draft may even not belong in the Guidelines at all; it could be a peripheral document on the TEI website or on the wiki.

Further discussion between me and Martin suggests that in fact 10.6.1 should stay where it is (this is the section of the msDescription chapter that talks about documenting the languages used in a text, irrespective of their transcription) but that it would also be desirable to have a single place where all aspects of the use of languages, characters, scripts, glyphs, writing modes would be encompassed, which might be referred to from several places. The directionality draft material could go into this, but it's not clear where such a unified chapter belongs. The existing chapter Chapter 5: Non-standard Characters and Glyphs is separate from the existing introductory chapter vi Languages and Character Sets because the former describes specific elements whereas the latter introduces general principles. It might make better logical sense to revise the latter to include at least some of the new material on directionality. User: Lou