Make left and right sidebars more RTL friendly [#378948]

Left and right sidebars can be problematic for RTL websites.

There are 2 ways that an RTL language can modify the layout of a LTR design:

Just flip the language to RTL and minimal change some CSS. These leaves major design elements the same (which is easiest for designers or themers), but may lead to unnatural-feeling websites for RTL users.
Flip the left and right sidebar’s positioning. This means the entire design has to flip, but usually means a better experience for RTL languages.

I think Drupal should make option 2 the preferred method. For example, compare http://www.amnesty.org/ with http://www.amnesty.org/ar

But then we have a slight semantic problem with the naming of left/right sidebars. If we switch the "left sidebar" to the right, its not a "left" sidebar anymore. :-p

The Tendu theme uses "First sidebar" and "Second sidebar". Acquia Marina uses "sidebar first" and "sidebar last".

I'm playing around with names in Zen 6.x-2.x and am leaning to:

regions[sidebar_first] = First sidebar
regions[sidebar_last] = Last sidebar

But I'm open to debate.

Comments

Comment #1

geerlingguy commented 21 February 2009 at 07:56

I vote $sidebar_first and $sidebar_last. A lot of themes (ones I make, and ones on the /themes/ section of d.o) put the sidebars next to each other, or on top of each other, anyways, so having "right" and "left" is simply an annoyance to me.

Comment #2

stephthegeek commented 21 February 2009 at 08:24

I was the one who made the call on that for the Amnesty theme, and the sidebar first/last naming seemed to work well for their Arabic team and made things clearer in site planning/discussions.

And agreed, it makes more sense when you have two sidebars on the same side as well.