Re: Suggested Solution for more RTL\LTR Agnostic Web

There was an attempt to do this at a W3C TPAC a while back (2010? not
sure), but it got rejected. Fantasai may remember the exact reasons. But
the part that always bothered me about this was this:

> depending on the direction of the document, the browser should interpret
the start and end accordingly

It does not really make sense to make it dependent on the direction of the
document (i.e. direction of the topmost element): the direction could
change any number of times between the topmost element in the document and
the element with -start or -end property. So, the proposal referred instead
to the direction of the element itself. The problem is that quite often,
that's not what one wants, but the direction of the parent element (when
the two are different). But this is not a hard-and-fast rule. In fact,
what's most useful might depend on the exact property: text-align:start
(which actually made it in and works in all browsers) refers to the
direction of the element itself, while float:start would most probably need
to refer to the parent, and padding-start probably needs to refer to the
element itself, but who knows?

On Wed, Mar 11, 2015 at 3:14 PM, Saad Alothman <me@saadalothman.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
>
> I work a lot on multi-lingual sites, and it happens to be that most of
> them contains both LTR and RTL Languages.
>
> Everytime we have to create one style (the main stylesheet), and if the
> Language is RTL, we include another stylsheet to almost flip all of what is
> inside the main stylesheet to the oposite direction horizontally, if it is
> a margin-left we make it margin-right,float:left becomes float:right , and
> so on.
>
> So we created a css class to do the floating that is "pull-start" and
> "pull-end", this haven't solved the issue completly, but now we override
> this class only instead of placing it in all classes.
>
> if the css attributes could have properties like : margin-start:,
> margin-end,Float:start,float:end, the same goes for all properties that
> have left and right, including positioning of the element , so adding to
> top,left,bottom, and right, the suggestion is to have start and end.
>
> depending on the direction of the document, the browser should interpret
> the start and end accordingly.
>
> Regards,
>
> Saad Alothman
>
>