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Almost all interfaces use a flow-like layout model, “anchoring” components to some corner of the window or a parent component, and finding the first available space after laying out previous components. This is a model that works well with how we look at things.

Users of left-to-right, top-to-bottom languages are used to starting in the top left corner and heading right and down: that’s where our eyes naturally go, and how we interact with books and such. So in user interfaces, we anchor most things to the top left corner.

Users of right-to-left, top-to-bottom languages are used to starting in the top right corner and heading left and down. So it makes sense for RTL user interfaces to anchor things to the top right corner in the same way and progress leftwards.

User interfaces are largely built to match how eyes scan, because there’s not a huge difference between reading and writing prose, and reading and interacting with user interfaces.

(I’d say your cars comparison is not relevant; there’s very little inherent reason to prefer one side to the other. Scissors are only a smidgeon more relevant, being based on predominant handedness, and LTR is probably more popular than RTL for similar reasons, RTL being harder to ink cleanly if you’re right-handed.)

Actually, yes, some semantic flipping is important. For example, when conveying a direction, in a right-to-left language, it should be flipped (the earliest step being on the right-most, while the latest step being on the left-most). Conveying a “go back” symbol, it would also have to be flipped.

Cars are a weird example: they’re right-hand drive for well over two billion people, regardless of LTR or RTL text.

It's not a requirement in theory, but how text aligns with the elements around it is massively important for usability. When you flip text, without flipping the layout and surrounding elements, it almost always becomes less useable as the text was originally designed with certain alignments in mind that no longer occur.

Also, speaking as a frontend engineer, it's usually much easier to flip everything as not doing so also increases the chance of weird text alignment/wrapping & overlap bugs.

RTL language users expect that reading will be done in RTL, not that everything will be done RTL. Scissors are the way they are because most people have stronger right hands than left hands, and that applies regardless of native or preferred language. The cursor keys are likely on the right for the same reason.

Website navigation is presumably derived from reading - if you generally read RTL, then your eyes will start at the top right of the screen/page and scan to the left. Where it gets interesting is on small touch screens like phones. Perhaps we ought to optimize that for single-hand use and put the hamburger menu icon on the right side to make it easier to reach with your thumb when in your right hand, regardless of language orientation.

In any case, my experience is that in a lot of RTL software[0] navigation is flipped, and the "previous/next page" arrows are reversed as well. But in meatspace this is less practical so at least in Israel, the play/forward/rewind buttons on old tape recorders (for example) will be with a LTR orientation. I suspect that if Israel was manufacturing their own music players a few decades ago things might look different today.

Now imagine you work at Spotify and you need to decide how to display the play/skip/previous controls in RTL. Do you mimic normal RTL forward/back and reverse the controls or go for skeumorphism and use the same controls your users already know?

[0] Locally made software such as yad2.co.il is more likely to do this because it's RTL-first. Google doesn't flip their pagination, possibly because they use the 'o's in their logo to link to to page numbers and they don't translate or reverse their logo. Bing does reverse the pagination. DDG sidesteps the problem by having a "Load more" button.

Consider a horizontal navigation bar with these links from left to right: Privacy Policy, Gallery, Directions and Contact Info, Our Products and Services and finally Home. The most important, relevant links are presented "last" and are hard to find. This would be the experience of a RTL user if you only swapped in translations and did not mirror

I don't think that Arabic users all require that all the controls be flipped. It's mainly the text that needs to be right-to-left, plus a couple of other things.

Counter-intuitively, it may well be easier to implement mirroring all the controls than it would be to implement mirroring only where it is really needed.

I've seen examples from translated schoolbooks where they replaced the text on the mirrored page. That must have led to some weird geography classes.

> Cars aren't right hand drive in arabic speaking countries, things like scissors are still made predominantly for right handed people. The cursor keys are on the right hand side of the keyboard, and so on.

None of these deal with text alignment problems, I guess.

> Why would you swap the navigation of a website from the left to the right side

Because text with alignment is part of the UI; perhaps it’s better if the text flow and UI flow match.

> Personally, I think the convention to flip almost everything is due to old technological constraints.

This could be easy to verify. E.g.: are there newspapers that predate Windows, where text is RTL but other layout elements flow from left to right?