RTL is not a mirror, sorry

Flipping the frame is not RTL

Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, RTL for short. The tempting shortcut is to duplicate every frame and flip it horizontally. It looks done. It is not.

A flipped frame mirrors everything. The search icon points the wrong way, clock hands run backwards, the logo reads in reverse. And mirroring moves things; it does not re-space them.

What flips, what stays

Start and end, not left and right

The fix is a mental one. Stop thinking "align left, align right". Think "align start, align end".

In LTR, start is left. In RTL, start is right. Design with start and end, and the layout follows the reading direction on its own. I bring this to developers early, so the code uses margin-inline-start instead of margin-left from day one.

Mixed text is the hard part

A page in pure Arabic is fine. Real content is mixed: an English place name inside an Arabic sentence, a price, a URL, a "Book now" button next to Arabic copy. Two directions on one line is called bidirectional text, and it breaks in odd ways. So the spec gets hard rules:

• English names stay LTR and untranslated.
• Numbers stay LTR, always.
• Mixed strings get RTL as the base direction; the browser handles the rest.
• Every mixed pattern gets its own test case.

Who checks it

I do not read Arabic, so I cannot see half the problems. A layout can look right to me and still read wrong. A native reader checks every round before anything goes to the client.

AI can draft the lists and the test strings. It cannot vouch for the grammar, and it will not be in the meeting explaining the design. I will.