I am currently developing a multilingual interface for a Django project. But when I started working in Arabic and Hebrew, I noticed that all pages got messed up after dir = "rtl" with the html tag (according to the instructions http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/ )
Does this mean that I need separate style sheets for languages from right to left?
Do not put the style attribute in the html tag.
Use the dir='rtl' attribute only inside the div, where you are actually using Arabic and Hebrew. Not for the whole page.
dir='rtl'
What you need to do in addition to adding dir = "rtl" to the tag is flipping through the stylesheets. Create an rtl.css stylesheet that looks like a mirror for your default stylesheet. For example. If your style.css has this rule below:
.some-class { margin: 10px 5px 10px 7px; }
In rtl.css it will be flipped as follows:
.some-class { margin: 10px 7px 10px 5px; }
Check this out: http://rtl-this.com/tutorial/3-different-ways-rtl-your-css