Re: [XHTML2] CITELANG, TITLELANG attributes

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004, Anne van Kesteren (fora) wrote:

> Currently, there is no way to describe the language of either the
> CITE[1] or TITLE[2] attribute.

For CITE, the language of the cited document can be specified in a
multiple of ways, e.g. in HTTP headers or, if it is an HTML document,
inside the document itself. Any attribute that specifies the language in
the citing document would thus normally be superfluous.

For TITLE, the origin is the problem is the approach of entering actual
textual content into attributes. This is bad practice, and the original
problem should be fixed instead of adding some extra features to remove
some of the problems. Note that a TITLELANG attribute would not work when
the TITLE attribute contains texts in two or more languages, which is a
quite reasonable case. If the TITLE attributes were replaced by TITLE
elements, for example, making each TITLE element specify, by definition,
an informative title for its parent element, the problem would vanish in a
puff of logic: the TITLE element could and should be allowed to have
normal inline content, including elements with their own LANG (oops,
sorry, xml:lang) attributes.

-- 
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

Received on Tuesday, 27 July 2004 17:02:59 UTC