Nice helper to create RTL CSS files
Via Ajaxian: CSSJanus is a CSS parser utility designed to aid the conversion of a website's layout from left-to-right (LTR) to right-to-left (RTL).
Ajaxian featured CSSJanus today: "Over on the Google Open Source blog I got to post about a new tool by Lindsey Simon that takes your CSS and spits out versions ready for the RTL world (or vice versa if you are a developer elsewhere that wants an English version..... which may be more common?)."
And indeed, this tool is really helpful when creating RTL sites or applications. If you want to support language that write from right to left, it's not sufficient to set the direction:rtl; CSS rule on the BODY tag. We learned that lesson a while ago when we added Arabic, Persian and Hebrew to our translations.
There is so much more to consider: elements that float from to left have to float from the right, asymmetrical padding or margins have to be flipped, frames and columns have to be reversed in order, etc. What CSSJanus does, is to take an existing CSS file or rule, and pretty smartly convert it to fit an RTL interface. Watch the screencast for a nice introduction:
A quick run on Horde's main CSS file revealed that we, with the help of the Arabic translator team, already did a pretty good job, but still missed a few rules. You can expect even better RTL support in Horde 3.2
