Re: [WebAIM] Lang attribute and "old" latin

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Using language markup at other markup levels, e.g. for individual 
> paragraphs or even words, is rather pointless, sad to say. There isn't 
> much support worth mentioning. (I use it, but mostly as a matter of 
> principle, or habit, and not very consistently. Many W3C pages, 
> including pages that declare that it should be used, don't use it. Most 
> web pages don't even make a try, so what motivation is there for 
> software developers to support it?)

Software developers /do/ support it. JAWS, for example, can switch 
voices inline based on the LANG attribute.

> For example, what would a screen reader do upon encountering a 
> special character like " ¶"?

Depends on its configuration.

> Style sheets, either page or user style sheets, could be used to style 
> words in a particular language as different from others, using a 
> selector like [lang="la"] or :lang(la). However, this does not work e.g. 
> on IE 6, which does not recognize such selectors.

If you're going the trouble of adding lang attributes, you could add 
class attributes for IE6 backwards compatibility at the same time.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis