text RTL attribute

I was doing a web development project on mathematical literacy for my
degree in 2010 and ran into an issue with the text RTL attribute.  I
contacted members of the W3C staff about it including Tim Berners-Lee, but
never got a reply.
The issue:
Without reading the specs for the RTL attribute, I assumed that with the
RTL text attribute, the cursor would appear on the right edge and move to
the left as characters are entered.  The text entered into a textbox would
appear and read from right to left or backwards.  Numbers are written and
read from left to right, but addition, subtraction, multiplication and
division are from right to left. The only difference I noticed between the
RTL and the default LTR attributes is that with LTR, the cursor begins on
the left edge and moves right, with RTL, the cursor begins on the right
edge and remains there.   If text entered using the RTL was always meant to
appear the same as text entered with the default LTR attribute, that's
fine, but very misleading. Will there ever be a text attribute allowing
actual right to left text entry?

Sincerely,

Richard Dunne.