We're excited to announce the release of right-to-left language support for Foundation! Foundation is an invaluable tool that we created to help us and designers around the world design great products faster.
Why Support Right-to-left Languages
As part of our quest for world domination, we started to look into internet usage in different regions. It was brought to our attention that mobile Internet use around the world has been on an exponential rise in the past few years. And many entrepreneurs are starting companies that cater to their particular region's needs. But for right-to-left languages, there was a lack of front-end frameworks that catered to them. This forced many designer to localize frameworks, such as Foundation, or start from scratch.
That's why the most advanced front-end framework in the world is now leading the charge with a release that supports right-to-left languages right out of the box!
Challenges of Right-to-Left Design
Coding websites is hard, and coding a website for two languages is even more difficult. It's a problem that presents a unique set of challenges. Reading patterns flip with right-to-left oriented layouts. To a designer, this means that floats, margins, paddings and all layout styles will have to be overridden with an additional stylesheet. This is time-consuming and introduces additional unnecessary files to download. In short, it's a hack — and it's time for a real solution.
Enter the New Hotness
We decided to do all the heavy lifting for designers up-front by providing an RTL version of Foundation 3.0.9. Because Foundation is so awesomely customizable, we created a separate version with the entire grid flipped for right-to-left layouts. Even better, our Foundation 3.1 release tomorrow will include this as part of the default Foundation. So if you're using SCSS (and you totally should be), all you need to do is make a small change in the Settings SCSS file, and Foundation will take care of the rest.
All the UI elements, like navigation bars, buttons, you name it, will be flipped, all the while maintaining the integrity of their margins and paddings! It's like magic! No more futzing with extraneous override stylesheets. Designers can now focus on designing great websites!
So many things!
There are so many ways you can get your hands on this fantastic time-saver! Grab the file containing the latest version of Foundation with RTL baked in on the Playground page.
