Screenshot showing that the Hebrew word "helium" appears on the left-hand side instead of the right-hand side. This affects not just alignment, but also cursor movement, backspace button behavior etc.
When I'm editing links to other language versions, the box for editing the link target does not define its language and direction using HTML lang and dir attributes and therefore shows the Hebrew word on the wrong side. If I would be using the Hebrew interface, it would show English words on the wrong side.
The dir attribute is obviously essential: without proper direction definition, there will be an abundance of problems with editing left-to-right text in right-to-left environments and vice versa.
The lang attribute is essential, too, even though it is less obvious - it is used for proper font rendering in some languages, for speech recognition, for spell checking and for other features.
lang and dir attributes must also be applied to elements that just show words in foreign languages (<td class="wb-sitelinks-link"> etc.). And even more generally, lang and dir attributes must be applied whenever it is known that an element is written in a different language.
See http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html for reference; it's a bit old, but completely relevant.
Version: unspecified
Severity: normal
Whiteboard: storypoints: 8
URL: http://wikidata-test-repo.wikimedia.de/wiki/Data:Q2?uselang=en
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