Arabic and right-to-left web development

Right-to-left is not a translation setting. A site in Arabic reads from the other edge of the screen, so the navigation, the layout, every icon that points somewhere and every form field mirrors with it — and the parts that do not mirror, a Latin brand name, a URL, a figure, sit inside the sentence running the opposite way from everything around them.

That last part is where most of the work is. A theme handed an Arabic language file is still a left-to-right site with Arabic text in it: the menu opens from the wrong side, the drawer slides in from the wrong edge, a number drags the punctuation around it to the wrong end of the line. None of it raises an error, and none of it is visible to anyone reading the site in another language — which is usually everyone who signed it off.

The work here runs from a journal archive of more than 12,000 Arabic articles to a Quran reader that has to know where every verse sits on a printed page. Several are bilingual rather than Arabic, which is the harder case: both directions have to be right, in one codebase.