multilingual websites and rtl direction - best practices

Question

Could you share any tips for supporting rtl direction in multilingual websites?

Apart from the text direction, should there be any changes, for instance, to the menus mark-up? The rtl CSS should be included in a separate file (like "layout-rtl.css") or a "rtl" class should be added to the body tag? I would like to know stuff like that.

I found a few tips here, but I would really appreciate someone's advice at first hand (someone that has already launched a website in a rtl language).

Thanks

Answer 1

From official W3C:

• Internationalization Best Practices: Handling Right-to-left Scripts in XHTML and HTML Content

Answer 2

what we do is declare some parameters in php like :

SIDE : right
OPOSIDE : left
DIR : rtl
OPODIR : ltr

for every site languages.

and we deal with only one css file and one template with divs, we add to css or template file replacement place holder

like :

float : {SIDE}
...

and we generate a real css file with php (replacements all what need to be replace), and the site take the css file that belong to him .

now you can do it with css framework like : LESS , BLUEPRINT , XCC

Answer 3

So long as you don't specify text direction = ltr anywhere in your CSS, setting it in the body class should be enough in terms of CSS issues.

Some things to consider. Text in images makes localization more time consuming in terms of editing images, getting translations, etc. While setting text properties to rtl is rather easy, re-creating an image is more difficult. Keep in mind that rtl language users read in the opposite direction, so menus that appear on the right in ltr languages should appear on the left in rtl languages.

Tickers that move in one direction in ltr langauges move in the opposite in rtl ones.