Arabic RTL, in practice.

Several of the platforms I've shipped are Arabic-first — Ftn in Saudi Arabia, Tashaleeh, and others. "Add RTL support" sounds like flipping a switch. It isn't. It's a hundred small decisions that only show up once real content lands.

The obvious part is direction: layout mirrors, text aligns right, the sidebar moves. Modern CSS logical properties handle most of it cleanly. The part that bites is mixed content — an Arabic sentence with an English product name and a Western numeral in the middle. Get the bidi isolation wrong and the punctuation jumps to the wrong end of the line.

Then there are the component libraries. A lot of them assume LTR in places you can't see — a date picker that lays out months left to right, an icon that means "next" pointing the wrong way, a carousel that scrolls backwards. You learn to audit every interactive component against real Arabic content before you trust it.

None of this is hard once you've been through it. But there's no substitute for having shipped it. RTL is a craft you learn by getting it wrong in front of users a few times, then never again.