By hass on
This is a question to the RTL people in here... :-)
The default IE behaviour is to show the scrollbars on the left side of the viewport by default if text direction is rtl. I found one hack for this to make IE align the scrollbars to the right like Firefox, Safari and all other browsers are doing.
html { direction: ltr; }
body { direction: rtl; }
My only question about this is - if you surf RTL websites - do you expect that the scrollbar is left (IE) or would it be much better for usability to have it aligned to the right like non-IE browsers doing this?
Comments
Since the question is about
Since the question is about "expectation", I believe everyone would expect things to just work as they are used to, meaning - don't make any effort to determine the location of the scroll bars - let them be determined by the browser.
People are used to their browsers, and expect them to work in a certain way (right or wrong).
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Z.Stolar
iStolar Consulting
linnovate.net - Open Source Solutions
iStolar illustration
Agree with Zohar
a good thing would be a browser option to personally set the scrollbar position, but since when does MS listens to people's usability habits...? :)
(oh, sorry, this goes for other browsers as well)
I believe this behavior of IE
I believe this behavior of IE derives from the overall behavior of RTL localized Windows versions.
There, the entire UI is mirrored: the "Start" button is on the right, the widow close/minimize/maximize buttons are on the left, and of course, the scrollbars are mirrored too.
My personal opinion is that this is a bad UI decision.
I work only with English Uis in my operation systems, if only because the RTLed interface can drive you mad, no icon is where it is supposed to be... I don't really know how scrollbars inside applications behave, if IE flips the in-page bars too on LTR sites. I believe it doesn't.
Anyway, there is no definitive answer to your question.
From pure "UI rules" point of view the scrollbars are supposed to be *after* the text, so in English they are supposed to be on the right, and on Hebrew sites on the left.
From pure "UI rules" point of
From pure "UI rules" point of view the scrollbars are supposed to be *after* the text
If I find this rule not comfortable, and you too (we both prefer the scrolls to be on the right, no matter the directionality of the current language), and probably others as well, then this "rules", are simply wrong.
======================
Z.Stolar
iStolar Consulting
linnovate.net - Open Source Solutions
iStolar illustration