Components: RTL documentation missing

[HarelM]

Breaking of #4367:

proposal:

RTL support exists but I could find how to use it in the documentation, I found an issue, linked to a changeset leading to the relevant code.

[devversion]

I think a guide in the guides/ folder would be enough. cc. @EladBezalel

[EladBezalel]

@HarelM @DevVersion well, i think the basic assumption is that it works out of the box, we can use a guide that says use dir="rtl" on html/body and automatically all the components will support it

[HarelM]

True, but material 2 also supports dynamic content direction change using [dir]=... which is a great feature that IMHO deserves a guide/page/paragraph somewhere.

[devversion]

Yeah I agree that we should briefly mention that RTL support is there & how you could use it.

Also important to mention is that RTL mode doesn't work when specifying the direction from CSS.

[parker-mike]

@EladBezalel @DevVersion Well, I tried to add dir="rtl" on html and most of the components appear as expected, but when I opened a dialog it still had dir="ltr" on the cdk-overlay-pane, which means that unfortunately not _all_ the components support it. It seems that we still have to manually set the MdDialogConfig.direction which is undocumented, and defaults to "ltr", I think that it should be possible not to specify the direction and to get whatever is specified on the near parent, which is probably would be html/body. Also I believe that there should be an option to dynamically change the direction of the whole page(switching dir on html/body), and not only of a part of the DOM using [dir]=....

[HarelM]

I use a variable on a service so that I can change it in one place to change all the components.
I manually add direction to all dialogs to support this, since they are not part if the "main" DOM it didn't feel weird to me.

[parker-mike]

Then, at least, it has to be well documented, currently there is no a single word about this property on the API reference page,

[EladBezalel]

When #4044 will get in it would support html/body, I agree we should address RTL on the docs.. next thing to do!

[parker-mike]

@jelbourn By the way, as per W3 https://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/bidi-xhtml/

Add a dir attribute to the html tag to set the default base direction of your page if it is right-to-left. Use the dir attribute on block elements within the page _only_ where you need to change the base direction.

So in my, maybe not so humble, opinion, MdDialogConfig.direction, as well as the overlayState.direction, should _not_ have a default value...

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