RE: 09 Oct 2003 - WCAG WG Teleconference Minutes

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003, Yvette P. Hoitink wrote:

>
>Thanks for these examples. As I understood it, though, my action
>item/challenge is to find examples where language switches in pages lead to
>confusing situations which might be helped by indicating the language in the
>source (for example by using a span around <span lang="nl">Nederlandse
>tekst</span>). I haven't seen any confusing situations in your examples.
>

It depends what you mean by confusing examples. I don't find there is any
confusion in the dutch examples (neither the simple one above nor the page
you pointed to). But that's because I have a good recognition for languages,
so running across half a page of vietnamese means I just expect not to
understand much of that bit, because it is in vietnamese.

But there are causes for confusion in unannounced switches - reading most
recent New Zealand Pakeha government documents is a jarring experience until
you realise that Pakeha (and various other things that seem like technical
terms) is a Maori word that can be looked up by an online service very
easily.

reading the Amrican Express page I pointed to gives intersting results,
especially for the non-latin scripts, if you're not using a graphic browser.
(They use a javascript to make it look as though there is a chinese title
attribute on one link, although there isn't).

I'll look at the minutes to see if I can get more context.

Cheers

Chaals