Directionality
HTML 4.01 and XHTML take into account that many languages read from right to left and provide attributes for handling the directionality of text. Directionality is part of a character’s encoding within Unicode.
The dir
attribute is used for
specifying the direction in which the text should be interpreted. It can
be used in conjunction with the lang
attribute and may be added within the tags of most elements. The
accepted value for direction is either ltr
for “left to right” or rtl
for “right to left.” For example, the
following code indicates that the paragraph is intended to be displayed
in Arabic, reading from right to left:
<p lang="ar" xml:lang="ar"dir="rtl">...</p>
The bdo
element, introduced in
HTML 4.01, also deals specifically with documents that contain
combinations of left- and right-reading text (bidirectional text, or
bidi, for short). The bdo
element is
used for “bidirectional override,” in other words, it specifies a span
of text that should override the intrinsic direction (as inherited from
Unicode) of the text it contains. The bdo
element uses the dir
attribute as follows:
<bdo dir="ltr"> English phrase in an otherwise Hebrew text</bdo>...
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