- From: Julian Vallis <lists@vallis.net>
- Date: Tue, 02 Dec 2003 18:25:46 -0000
- To: W3C WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
It's not the XHTML specs that are the problem. It's WCAG that specifies that the lang="" attribute be used, and although will not fail if xml:lang is used, it will fail if you omit lang. All I'm saying is keep this in line with DTD used on the page. As I originally said, it's not an important issue, but I was just bringing it to light since it was an ambiguity - something that specs shouldn't have. As for the meta tag, it's probably just a hangover from Netscape / IE / Havago browsers intercompatibility days (I've been doing this too long now), but I seem to remember that it had to be put in the markup to get browsers to render the text correctly. All this was a particularly annoying aspect in pre lang attribute and pre unicode days. The other thing that's nice about the meta tag is it needn't be ratified in a standard - you can bung pretty much anything you want as long as you form the tag correctly. It was never anything to do with Dublin Core or HTTP specs - just to get browsers rendering text correctly. Jules
Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2003 13:25:58 UTC