Comment from the i18n review of: http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
Comment 1 At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0802-html5/ Editorial/substantive: S Tracked by: RI Location in reviewed document: 3.4.4 [http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/#the-dir] Comment: \"The processing of this attribute depends on the presentation layer. For example, CSS 2.1 defines a mapping from this attribute to the CSS \'direction\' and \'unicode-bidi\' properties, and defines rendering in terms of those properties.\" We think that HTML 5, like HTML 4, should be able to render bidirectional text without a style sheet. It would break backwards compatibility to remove the ability of a browser to do so without CSS. Therefore in our opinion, HTML 5 has to describe the expected behavior in at least the detail of HTML 4 rather than leave it up to the \"presentation layer\". Note that we do not want to impose a requirement on implementations of HTML 5 to implement CSS, but you could describe the expected behaviour by just referencing CSS and defining a default stylesheet fragment. This would just mean that an HTML 5 implementation has to make things behave as if it used this CSS default stylesheet fragment
