[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 27889] [Chromium] RTL autocomplete popup is not layout correctly.

[bugzilla-daemon at webkit.org]

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27889





--- Comment #7 from Aharon (Vladimir) Lanin <aharon at google.com>  2009-08-05 02:18:31 PDT ---
To prevent confusion on the directionality issue, I would suggest using simpler
test strings: "hi!" and "אא!". The directionality is LTR if the exclamation
mark comes out on the right, and RTL if it comes out on the left.

> 1. In windows, Safari, FireFox, and IE all behave the same. They all display
> the items in the popup list in left-to-right direction, no matter whether the
> input field is an LTR or RTL field.

That is not the result that I get:

Firefox 3.0.11: always in browser language directionality (i.e. LTR)
Safari 4.0.2: always in element directionality (i.e. RTL for the test page)
Opera 9.64: did not auto-complete
IE 7: did not auto-complete

Thus, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome on Windows all do different things.

It is important to point out that displaying a value in the right
directionality is not a nice-to-have. In the wrong directionality, the value
often comes out simply garbled. For example, displaying "17 Main St." as ".Main
St 17", which is what comes out when it is displayed RTL, is simply wrong.

BTW, the current Chrome bug that the drop-down is always left-aligned, even for
a dir=rtl align=right element, is also a bug. No one else does that. Chrome has
the same bug for <select> elements.

In my opinion, it is Chrome's current behavior re directionality here that is
the most useful. In most cases, a text input needs to be capable of accepting -
and displaying correctly - both LTR and RTL values. Thus, our BiDi support
recommendations for web pages is to add directionality auto-detection scripts
to most inputs that after each keystroke check the directionality of the
current input value and adjust its dir and align values accordingly. Thus, both
LTR and RTL values could have been submitted in the past, and all need to be
displayed correctly, so checking the directionality of each value in the
dropdown as Chrome does is the best. Failing that, Safari's approach of using
the element's current directionality for all the items in the dropdown is still
pretty much ok, since the likelihood that any given user will have entered both
LTR and RTL values for a single field is not very high. In fact, it is in fact
probably the better approach when the page does not have the directionality
auto-detection scripts I mentioned earlier. But Firefox's approach of always
using the browser language's directionality is totally nonsensical: RTL pages
taking consistently RTL inputs will always have the dropdown values garbled.

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