RFC 2070 introduces and HTML 4.0 adopts a whole bouquet of new HTML elements, attributes, and entities for this sort of presentation markup. These new features are summarized in the following sections. While most Western languages are written from left to right, such languages as Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left.
Unicode standard has a number of direction-related provisions.
To support this behavior, RFC 2070 introduces directional markup tools of three types. The second type of direction markup is represented by the new DIR attribute that, like LANG , can be used with nearly all HTML tags to indicate the writing direction of the text in the element's contents. As is the case with CSS attributes, you can use the DIR attribute when no element is normally discriminated by using the SPAN element as a sort of a neutral container. If the DIR attribute is omitted, the element inherits the writing direction of its parent element. The entire HTML document's default direction is left to right.