18 November, 2009

Web and RTL languages

One day you may be facing the fact that you have to deal with RTL language support on your web page. I'm not writing how to do it, you can google about it. Instead, I'm giving you a hint that does not pop out of google that easily:

In case of RTL there are still some texts that need to be kept LTR: company names, numbers etc. I suggest you to surround these texts with special characters in your HTML code:


‭‭myLTRtext in RTL language‬


Where:
‭‭ - left-to-right override
‬‬ - pop directional formatting (a formatting character that cancels a previous bi-directional formatting character on the same line in plain text)

More info on more of these special characters can be found:
https://listserv.heanet.ie/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9605&L=HTML-WG&F=P&P=4668

Without these surrounding markers I've personally experienced some really strange layout bugs in IE.

No comments: