Positioning the scrollbar on Arabic pages

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Positioning the scrollbar on Arabic pages

Arabic and Scrollbars

Dave McClure

3:56 pm on Sep 20, 2005 (gmt 0)

Greetings.
I have a bilingual site with Arabic and English pages. The pages validate as 4.01 transitional and the CSS also validates. Everything is fine, except that in IE6 the vertical scrollbar on the Arabic pages appears on the left (which is good!) but in Firefox it remains on the right. This is the code to start an Arabic page:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">

<html Lang="ar" dir="rtl">
<head>
<title>ترايميديا ـ الشرق الاوسط</title>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1256">

I don't make any reference to the scrollbar in the CSS. Is there any way I can ask the Firefox scrollbar to appear on the left (without changing what IE6 is doing)?

encyclo

1:46 am on Sep 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

I'm not 100% certain on this, but I don't think that Firefox supports placing the scrollbar on the left for pages written in RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew...). The difference between IE and Firefox is that the former considers the scrollbars to be part of the page (and so they can be styled, etc.), whereas the latter considers the scrollbars as an integral part of the browser chrome - which is unrelated to the displayed page.

Dave McClure

7:29 am on Sep 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

That makes sense, thanks. It's not a major issue but it would have been nice.