Removal of the lang attribute (was Re: Status of Iframe in XHTML 1.1)

whelan@itp.unibe.ch (John Whelan) wrote:
		(....)
> For that matter, XHTML 1.1
> seems to be backtracking from some of the philosophical changes made
> in HMTL4 (sorry I didn't RTFM before this, but despite having been
> subscribed to this list and endured endless ranting about a "tag soup
> spec", I was totally unaware that there was an XHTML 1.1), e.g., the
> removal of the lang attribute.  Would someone care to elaborate on
> some of the logic here?

- the lang attribute was added to HTML 4
- XML 1.0 defined xml:lang for that purpose
- since XHTML is an XML application, xml:lang is preferred
- XHTML 1.0 defined both lang and xml:lang for backward and forward
  compatibility
- since XHTML 1.1 is a forward-looking document type, it has only xml:lang
  and removed the lang attribute

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium