Dear Ido
If you want to mark up a whole page as RTL, you should put the dir
attibute on the HTML element and not on the BODY element.
The W3C'S Internationalization Best Practices recommends adding
dir="rtl" to the html tag any time the overall document direction is
right-to-left.
Internet Explorer has been developed so that appltying the dir attribute
to the HTMl or BODY elements has different effects on rendering and UI
mirroring.
Accoring to microsoft documentation:
For <html dir=rtl> the following behavior can be expected:
* The OLE/COM ambient property of the document is set to
AMBIENT_RIGHTTOLEFT.
• The document direction can be toggled through the document object
model (DOM) (document.direction="ltr/rtl").
• An HTML Dialog will get the correct extended windows styles set so it
displays as a RTL dialog on a Bidi enabled system.
• If the document has vertical scrollbars, they will be on the left side
if dir="rtl".
If the dir="rtl" attribute is placed on the BODY instead of the HTML
element:
• The OLE/COM ambient property for the document will not reflect the
direction on the BODY.
• The ability to toggle the document's direction will be lost, because
the body's direction is explicitly set.
• Dialog window frames and captions will not reflect the direction of
the BODY.
• Vertical scrollbars will be reflect the direction assigned to the
body, not the document.
I suspect that putting the dir tagg on the BODY element will have
implications for UI mirroring in a rnage of contexts.
Andrew
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