I'm reviewing the patch for this new feature now... it's a big one, about 20 pages long, too big to get into 1.6.
Haven't heard from Semion about this patch for a long time, marking as milestone future for now.
Is this ticket dead? Did the team give up on the plugin?
The ticket is NOT dead. The last patch which was provided to Bill included a complete implementation for IE 8 / FF 3.x. However the subsequent request from Bill was to address additional browsers: Chrome and Safari . Meanwhile IE 9 and FF 4 are also supposed to be supported (which might require additional coding and fixing). Unfortunately almost no funding available for this work and other priorities our development team has prevent us from making a tangible progress at this time. We do plan to get back to this work in 2011. However, unfortunately I can't commit for specific date. As opposed to base text direction work (new parameter textDir for dijit and dojox widgets) which can be done in chunks (namely addressing one widget each time), the work for rich text editor is much more complex and time consuming. Thus we need to find wide enough window to address new requirements posed by Bill.
From the technical point of view there are no (as far as I can see) any difficulties or any misunderstandings between us and Bill (the design was already agreed upon). Thus the main issue is funding and timing.
OK, I'll mark this as patchwelcome and we'll reopen it when we get an updated patch that runs on all browsers.