RE: meta content-language

(personal comment)

I concur with Richard's analysis. I further think that, while it is a little complicated to explain the difference between content metadata and text processing language, we should be very careful to avoid implying that <meta> or a pragma at all affect how a document is processed. I'd even go further and suggest that it should not affect the text processing language. The text processing language is a job for lang/xml:lang.

Frontpage's checking of the format of the content-language header is a Good Thing but shouldn't imply anything about how that document later is processed.

In looking at 4.2.5.3, I also notice some problems:

1. The content language collecting algorithm doesn't deal with the fact that there can be multiple languages in the <meta> tag. It is written in a way that jams them together. Thus the value "fr, de" becomes the language "frde", which is not the intention. The algorithm should collect the list of languages (and not set the default text processing language). There is a note to the effect that it collects only one language, but that doesn't fit with how I read the text. Since <meta> can and should be permitted to contain a list of languages, an algorithm that sets the content language to only the first language is inappropriate.

2. The reference is to "RFC 3066", which is obsolete. Please reference BCP 47. I know you mean to permit formerly-illegal-but-syntactically-permitted tags from the 3066 era, but BCP 47 provides a production for that purpose (obs-language). And illegal tags are, well, illegal tags. We shouldn't encourage them.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Chair -- W3C Internationalization Core WG

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-i18n-core-request@w3.org [mailto:public-i18n-core-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Richard Ishida
> Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2008 9:09 AM
> To: 'Ian Hickson'; 'Henri Sivonen'
> Cc: 'HTML WG'; public-i18n-core@w3.org
> Subject: RE: meta content-language
> 
> 
> In the I18n Activity we considered the alternative ways  of
> declaring
> language for a long time, and the result of our thinking is summed
> up at
> 
...

Received on Thursday, 14 August 2008 16:50:09 UTC