HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
By far, the most common form of the
<html>
tag is simply:
<html>
document head and body content
</html>
3.6.1.1. The dir attribute
The
dir
attribute specifies in which direction the browser should render
text within the containing element. When used within the
<html>
tag, it
determines how text will be presented within the entire document. When
used within another tag, it controls the text's direction for just the con-
tent of that tag.
By default, the value of this tag is
ltr
, indicating that text is presented
to the user left to right. Use the other value,
rtl
, to display text right
to left, for languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Of course, the results de-
pend on your content and the browser's support of HTML 4 or XHTML.
Netscape and Internet Explorer versions 4 and earlier ignore the
dir
at-
tribute. The HTML 4-compliant Internet Explorer versions 5 and 6 simply
right-justify (
dir=rtl
) the text, although if you look closely at
Figure 3-2
,
you'll notice that the browser moves the punctuation (the period) to the
other side of the sentence. Netscape 6 right-justified everything, includ-
ing the ending period, but versions 7 and 8 did not (yet another sign
that the browser wars are over):
<html dir=rtl>
<head>
<title>Display Directions</title>
</head>
<body>
This is how IE 6 renders right-to-left directed text.
</body>
</html>
