CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlcssinternationalizationmultilingualright-to-left
Nathan H
Nathan H

Reputation: 49371

CSS reverse a whole website (mirror effect)

I am building a multi-lingual website. Some languages (like Hebrew) read from right-to-left. Besides the actual text, those users are used to having navigation and other visual clues reversed.

For example the main menu on top would be aligned to the right. "back" button would point forward, logo on the top right instead of top left, etc.

One solution is of course to create a whole new design, however that would mean I'd have to maintain 2 templates. Not ideal.

I was just thinking, would it be possible to flip the entire design in CSS? Like looking in a mirror?

I'm also opened to better solutions if this seems far fetched.

Technologies used: PHP, Yii, Less.css, jQuery

Upvotes: 8

Views: 18064

Answers (8)

Honcky
Honcky

Reputation: 25

I agree to Sean's answer, it actually works! But there's one thing I'd like to mention: he needs to remove the "margin" and the "width" in order to make the page more readable but still flipping.

body { -moz-transform: scaleX(-1); -o-transform: scaleX(-1); -webkit-transform: scaleX(-1); transform: scaleX(-1); filter: FlipH; -ms-filter: "FlipH"; }

Upvotes: 0

Tomer W
Tomer W

Reputation: 3443

There is a great Magic Tool for that called rtlcss TLDR; long time ago, I got away with doing the following: 1. if an element has a direction:rtl -> remove it 2. if an element have no direction:rtl -> add one in most cases, add direction:rtl to body 4. if element has align:right/left' -> switch left/right 5. if element hasmargin-right/left` -> switch left/right

Limitations which are not handled: 1. Statically placed elements may not be placed right 2. Relative placements may not be placed right 3. Styles in the HTML should be taken care of (if exists, suggest to move into the CSS)

be careful if you plan on using Find & Replace as right & left can be found in mysterious places.
e.g. .copyright { ... } can become .copyleft { ... }

Searching today (Jan '18) i found this great tool that do all the above for you: Take a look at RTLCSS Website

I used it as command line, as i needed to RTL a library CSS i had once, but it can be bundled in your build steps.

Upvotes: 0

Amir E. Aharoni
Amir E. Aharoni

Reputation: 1318

The developers of MediaWiki, the software that powers Wikipedia in hundreds of languages, developed a tool called CSSJanus, which can cleverly flip your CSS on the fly for right-to-left languages:

https://github.com/cssjanus

This is successfully used for Wikipedias in right-to-left languages, and as a result they require very little duplicate maintenance of CSS.

Upvotes: 2

Niki van Stein
Niki van Stein

Reputation: 10724

You can flip the entire website using Seandunwoody his answer but that would reverse the text and icons and images and such as well. Provided that you place your content in <p> and <h1> 2 and 3 tags, which you do not put into each other (so no <p><p></p></p>) you can apply the css like this:

body,p,h1,h2,h3 { 
    margin: 0 auto;
    width: 300px;
    -moz-transform: scaleX(-1);
    -o-transform: scaleX(-1);
    -webkit-transform: scaleX(-1);
    transform: scaleX(-1);
    filter: FlipH;
    -ms-filter: "FlipH";
  }

What it does is basically the double mirror trick, it mirrors the complete website and then it mirrors all the small paragraph and titles which contain your text and images back to the original orientation but still in the position of the reversed website.

Hacky but it works (not so nice on IE though).

*You also need to add the dir='rtl' to the html or body tag to make sure the text is alligned to the right and hebrew is reversed (english characters will stay left to right but allign right).

Upvotes: 1

Khaled Faher
Khaled Faher

Reputation: 41

html {
  direction:rtl;
}

This will reverse everything on page from right to left. You need to adjust this for every element in your page.

Upvotes: 3

Sean
Sean

Reputation: 6499

It is possible to flip the entire site exactly as you describe with but a few lines of CSS see here: http://jsbin.com/aduqeq/5/edit

CSS:

body { 
        margin: 0 auto;
        width: 300px;
        -moz-transform: scaleX(-1);
        -o-transform: scaleX(-1);
        -webkit-transform: scaleX(-1);
        transform: scaleX(-1);
        filter: FlipH;
        -ms-filter: "FlipH";
      }

There are a few downsides to this approach however:

1) While it works Fine in Firefox + Chrome, it only sort of works in IE8+ (the text looks very strange to me in IE) expect support to be a bit patchy (this is a new CSS3 feature)

2) There are obvious semantic disadvantages here

3) Some people seem to have a thing about vendor prefixes

Overall using RTL on the body and using a different stylesheet might be a much better alternative here, even thought it's more cumbersome for you, the end user is provided with a better experience (unfortunately the quick fixes we want aren't always available)

Upvotes: 11

Tom van der Woerdt
Tom van der Woerdt

Reputation: 29975

A lot of sites consist of a menu bar and a content area. These are usually the main areas of focus for flipping. Should be easy with 3 lines of CSS :

html[dir="rtl"] #menu {
    float: right;
}

This same CSS code can easily be adapted to match other areas that should be moved. There's really no need to maintain 2 sets of templates, unless you hardcoded coordinates (which was a bad idea anyway).

Of course, make sure to set <html dir="rtl">

Upvotes: 4

semir.babajic
semir.babajic

Reputation: 741

You can try:

body {
  direction:rtl;
}

But that would just give you a starting point to start from...

Hope it helps.

Upvotes: 2

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