Re: what's the language of a document ?

Henri Sivonen scripsit:

> Moreover, making validators emit a message (of any kind) about the
> absence of a language declaration is likely to lead to authoring tools
> putting in a placeholder in order to silence validators. As a result,
> at least "en" and "en-US" can often be taken to mean "placeholder".

Quite so.  Google, at least, explicitly disregards "en"-based language
tags when determining the language of a web page for search purposes.
Other language tags are accepted as evidence, but are not treated as
determinative.

-- 
John Cowan    http://ccil.org/~cowan    cowan@ccil.org
Economists were put on this planet to make astrologers look good.
        --Leo McGarry