Christoph Reinartz

Our first right-to-left platform was released in 2014. We had developed a solution to generate right-to-left CSS with Sass mixins and variables as we have described in a blog article. We used this approach for nearly 3 years but recently migrated the right-to-left generation from pre-processing to post-processing with RTLCSS. With this article I would like to share the reasons for the migration as well as our experiences and lessons learned.

While our company and our application were constantly growing, we often ran into some consistency issues between code and design. Because we didn't have a design/frontend system and development guidelines to follow, our UI became cluttered and unsustainable. This caused maintenance issues, slowed down our UI Development and caused us to produce technical debt with an overcomplicated CSS/DOM structure. In the end, we were afraid of spending our time on figuring out crazy rendering bugs rather than rapidly developing new UI features. I gave a lightning talk at the beginning of 2015 to present what we had learned at the LeanUX Meetup in Düsseldorf.

For our expandation in the middle east area with our platforms in Israel and United Arab Emirates we had a particularly interesting problem to solve: How do we flip the layout of our page?