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A lot of money is spent in design these days, but most of the times nobody cares about the RTL style. In fact, all designs are draw with LTR in mind. Once you h

A lot of money is spent in design these days, but most of the times nobody cares about the RTL style. In fact, all designs are draw with LTR in mind. Once you have a fairly medium/big app that's designed solely for LTR, the cost of also implementing a RTL rendering is enormous. Every component should be designed twice and implemented with conditional rendering depending on locale. Isn't there a simpler solution for supporting RTL? Why not render everything LTR and then flip horizontally? Could it work?

sharikous 5y ago
The issue is that not everything has to be flipped. Numbers are an example but think about LTR words embedded in a RTL language (some may be urls or email addresses or untranslatable texts). Designing an HTML page with RTL content is basically a nightmare because the tags are still in English. Actually some programmers do exactly as you say and flip the view completely, including tags, when they work in a mixed document. I have seen this flow with programmers who use vim in the terminal. But not, the cost is really not enormous nowadays. It's really a matter of really easy fixes and some testing. Similarly to many other accessibility features the issue is most often ignored completely, however.
kingcharles 5y ago
There are other problems with big apps. Look at the comments under a YouTube video. YouTube is one of the biggest sites in the world, but it was written and designed by LtR natives. The comments have to support both LtR and RtL languages, but the comment viewing can only support one layout, so the experience is sub-par for RtL. For instance, RtL comments will start at the right and span towards the left where the user's avatar is, whereas Latin comments will sit nicely next to the user's avatar. Tl;dr: There is no perfect solution when your site has to support both LtR and RtL in the same page at the same time. Someone is going to suffer.
Tiktaalik 5y ago
I worked on a game where we shipped that solution. We flipped everything post render but also built some tech to be able to tag certain individual elements that we didn’t want RTL (essentially just flipping those individual elements again).
OulaX 5y ago
> all designs are draw with LTR in mind I agree. Take a look at Figma, it's a fantastic tool, but it doesn't even support writing in RTL languages without using a plugin!

sharikous 5y ago

The issue is that not everything has to be flipped. Numbers are an example but think about LTR words embedded in a RTL language (some may be urls or email addresses or untranslatable texts). Designing an HTML page with RTL content is basically a nightmare because the tags are still in English. Actually some programmers do exactly as you say and flip the view completely, including tags, when they work in a mixed document. I have seen this flow with programmers who use vim in the terminal. But not, the cost is really not enormous nowadays. It's really a matter of really easy fixes and some testing. Similarly to many other accessibility features the issue is most often ignored completely, however.

kingcharles 5y ago

There are other problems with big apps. Look at the comments under a YouTube video. YouTube is one of the biggest sites in the world, but it was written and designed by LtR natives. The comments have to support both LtR and RtL languages, but the comment viewing can only support one layout, so the experience is sub-par for RtL. For instance, RtL comments will start at the right and span towards the left where the user's avatar is, whereas Latin comments will sit nicely next to the user's avatar. Tl;dr: There is no perfect solution when your site has to support both LtR and RtL in the same page at the same time. Someone is going to suffer.

Tiktaalik 5y ago

I worked on a game where we shipped that solution. We flipped everything post render but also built some tech to be able to tag certain individual elements that we didn’t want RTL (essentially just flipping those individual elements again).

OulaX 5y ago

> all designs are draw with LTR in mind I agree. Take a look at Figma, it's a fantastic tool, but it doesn't even support writing in RTL languages without using a plugin!