Since when Markdown was just about ASCII text ? then we can't write French, Arabic, Chinese using markdown ?
my whole point is to define a syntax indication in the specs on how RTL elements should be identified when converted to say HTML. when converted, THAT element (or the whole document) would contains dir="RTL" attribute in its tag.
for example, something like this:
<-rtl--
Foo
Bar
would convert to:
<p dir="rtl">Foo
Bar
</p>
Prettifying won't help... RTL elements/document should be indicated in markdown
I don't agree that it should be defined in markdown, RTL languages should be detected by the parser and be outputted within a block-level element, P is good, with dir="rtl" as you mentioned.
I really disagree, RTL should be defined in Markdown,.. as the ZEN of Python says:
"Explicit is better than implicit."
this is a case where indicating RTL should be done explicitly, letting the parser/browser or whatever do the work still won't help. Why?
think about a mixed text of one sentence/line where there's only one word in Arabic at the beginning and the rest of it is Latin... the browser/parser or whatever will think of it like LTR text because the sum of latin words > sum of Arabic words. which is False.
A live example of this is Facebook. it does actually a Layout detection based on the content's language in comments. but it sucks in many cases. try to write a comment in Arabic with a mention of someone's name (the name in Latin) to see what I mean.
so IMO, neither dir='auto' nor the parser can detect this implicitly, we still don't have the AI for smarter detection, even if we have, there are cases where you want RTL regardless of the content. thus it SHOULD be defined in Markdown.
my whole point is to define a syntax indication in the specs on how RTL elements should be identified when converted to say HTML. when converted, THAT element (or the whole document) would contains dir="RTL" attribute in its tag.
for example, something like this:
<-rtl--
Foo
Bar
would convert to:
<p dir="rtl">Foo
Bar
</p>
Prettifying won't help... RTL elements/document should be indicated in markdown