Right-to-left Styling
September 24, 2025
Over 292 million people around the world speak Arabic as their first language. Arabic (al-Arabiyyah, pronounced /al ʕarabijja/, /ʕarabiː/) is my native language, and I sometimes build websites that need to support both left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL) styles.
Introduction To RTL Styling #
The default page direction in CSS is LTR. If you check the browser of your choice and inspect the browser’s default agent styles for the
htmlelement, you will notice thatltris the default value for thedir(or “direction”) property. Below is a basic example to show the difference between an LTR and an RTL layout.
Source: Right-to-left Styling
Hundreds of millions of people use languages that read from right to left. Which doesn’t simply mean that text flows in the direction opposite to what readers of European languages expect, but pages are oriented differently from what we expect as well.
Amart Shadeed has become one of the most comprehensive and valuable voices in CSS, web design, and development in recent years. Absolutely everything he writes or publishes is worth your attention.
A very comprehensive guide to right-to-left styling for the web that even if that’s not something you do often, if at all, is worth at least having a basic understanding of.
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