I will not be attending two of the choice conferences this year. Xtech 2006 and WWW2006 which both collide with my holiday to the states. Its a shame because both seem very promising but I'm hoping I can get involved virtually or something. But I'm kicking myself after hearing Paul Graham will be delivering a keynote at Xtech 06
One very exciting bit of news I have is that Paul Graham has agreed to deliver one of the keynote sessions at XTech. I'm very pleased about this, and it follows in the tradition we've established of having interesting and challenging speakers, rather than putting plenary sessions up for sale to sponsors.
I was also hoping to put a paper in for Xtech 2006 about the state of RSS when it comes to Languages but its pretty pointless if I cant be there to present it. Oh well, and just when I'm starting to make some progress with a proposed RSS and ATOM extension to declare language and directionality.
In a discussion on a w3c.org mailing list – Stephen Deach from Adobe said the following.
Yes, you'll need to set direction at the block/paragraph-level to properly initialize the Unicode BiDi rule (and above paragraph if you have lists or other indention). It's probably fine to allow setting dir anyplace you set lang (which would include on span/inlines).
Felix Sasaki sent this wiki link which is really interesting in regards to Bidirectional text support.