Re: Tagging text with no language (Draft for review)

Hi Richard,

Richard Ishida wrote:
> Here's is the link to the article we said we'd discuss at the next telecon, with a view to publishing it.  Please read (it's not long).
>
> http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-no-language.en.php
>   

[You should always use attributes to identify the human language of the 
text, when known, on the highest possible element of documents in HTML 
or a format based on XML, so that applications such as voice browsers, 
style sheets, and the like can process that text. In XML-based formats 
you would usually use the xml:lang attribute, and in XHTML/HTML the lang 
and/or xml:lang attributes. (See Declaring Language in XHTML and HTML 
for details about language tagging in HTML.)
You can override that initial language setting for a part of the 
document that is in a different language, eg. some French quotation in 
an English document, by using the same attribute(s) around the relevant 
bit of text. ]

This passage, eps. the statement "use attributes", does not seem to be 
relevant to the topic. And there are cases where attributes are not 
possible, see
http://www.w3.org/International/its/techniques/its-techniques.html#EX-devlang-1
So I would drop these paragraph and start the "background" section with 
the "Suppose ..." paragraph. You might then add just one sentence like 
"This article uses examples with xml:lang, which is the recommended way 
of language declaration in XML.

[However you should only tag text as undetermined if you can't just 
leave it as is. In practice, this means you should only use this markup 
at the document level where the format you are using requires it, or 
where the undetermined text is embedded in some content that has already 
been labeled for language in some way.]

not sure what "this markup" to. Do you mean "xml:lang with the value '' 
or 'und'"?

after [You cannot leave the lang attribute empty in HTML, either (for 
the same reason).], I would point to appropriate declarations, e.g.: "In 
your DTD, If possible, declare xml:lang as CDATA so that using the empty 
value is possible. For XML Schema users, rely on the XML schema document 
for the XML namespace [1].".

Felix

[1] http://www.w3.org/2001/xml.xsd
> Cheers,
> RI
>
> ============
> Richard Ishida
> Internationalization Lead
> W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
>  
> http://www.w3.org/International/
> http://rishida.net/blog/
> http://rishida.net/
>
>  
>
>
>

Received on Friday, 26 October 2007 00:19:15 UTC