Multilanguage UTF-8 website with Arabic
arabic, css, utf-8
Solution
Reading http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/ and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_localization could be useful.
Some things I can think of:
- your choice of colors and images could prove offensive or bad taste in some countries
- every image with text should be translated (image and alt); every image with directionality should be reversed (ex: an arrow)
- try to avoid class naming like `class="left"` if you don't want future headaches. Top, bottom, before or after are OK I think but not left/right.
- you'll have to check each CSS instructions about text-align, background-position, float, clear and obviously left and right with position: absolute/relative;
- different fonts need different font sizes (though this problem concerns asiatic fonts mainly)
- as for any other supported language, many bits of text in templates should be translated.
By "css selector to swith text alignment", do you mean `dir="rtl"` ? This is an HTML attribute. But you'll still need a class ('ll be fine on the body element) to act like a giant switch for your design needs. Like
.en .yourclass { background: url(images/en/bg.jpg) }
.ar .yourclass { background: url(images/ar/bg.jpg) }
edit: an attribute selector would do the same but then there are those bad ol' IE ...
:lang(ar) .yourclass { background: url(images/ar/bg.jpg) }
or
[lang|="ar"] .yourclass { background: url(images/ar/bg.jpg) }
Problem
I will be coding a website that will have Arabic as a supported language. With UTF8 unicode I believe I can cover Arabic alphabet. I've also read that it reads right to left so I guess I should align right when displaying on Arabic. I'm asking the community for experience and possible pitfalls. - utf-8 unicode - css selector to swith text alignment Thank you in advance for your input.