311383 - add RTL theme support to SeaMonkey

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Themes, defect)

Description

[Reuven Gonen]

currently Firefox can detect if the locale is RTL, and if such, change the theme
for RTL compatibility. this is not yet applied in SeaMonkey.

Reproducible: Always

link to the Firefox bug:

Bug 221824

Comment 1

[(no longer active)]

Mass-assigning the new rtl keyword to RTL-related (see bug 349193).

Comment 2

[Robert Kaiser]

Just FYI, the problem in SeaMonkey goes as far as not having the chromedir attribute set in many places where we should. We would need someone who knows RTL well enough to look into what's actually wrong in SeaMonkey. Ideally that one would provide patches to our XUL/CSS, but if (s)he can identify the places where we have problems, we're probably also able to provide the necessary changes.

Comment 3

[Tomer Cohen :tomer]

You can take the RTL theme, and diff it with the regular theme in order to see the changes needed. 

(Please don't look at me; We don't have up-to-date version of SeaMonkey in Hebrew for now.)

Comment 4

[(no longer active)]

Can the Force RTL extension be helpful here?  It should of course be addapted to SeaMonkey, but my question is, would the idea be helpful?  If so, I can probably give it a shot.

<http://ehsanakhgari.org/mozilla/extensions/firefox/force-rtl>

Comment 5

[Robert Kaiser]

Tomer:
There is no RTL theme that's up-to-date with trunk SeaMonkey, AFAIK.

Ehsan:
Not sure if it helps, esp. for someone like me who has absolutely no clue which elements are supposed to change to RTL and which not.

Comment 6

[(no longer active)]

The basic rule of thumb is every element should be mirrored, unless there's a good reason not to.  And this includes the metaphors such as back pointing to left (it should point to right in RTL locales, and any shortcut keys which rely on such metaphors need to be toggled accordingly).

In Firefox, for example, the only element which is not mirrored is the location bar, because URLs are inherently LTR.  Of course I understand that SeaMonkey, being a much larger application suite, may need more attention, just thought I'd mention this general rule.