Re: For review: Tagging text with no language

John Cowan wrote:

> BCP 47 explicitly excludes computer languages from its scope, as do
> the ISO 639 family of standards.  So "zxx" is the only available tag.

Tagging source code snippets as "zxx" would be barbaric.  But it's a
case where "" is clearly better than "und".  Actually I think "" is
always better than "und" unless I intend to flag something for later
review.  In the context of Richard's article and XML documents, for
other purposes it might be different.  The use of "und" in XHTML 1.0
is IMO only a temporary kludge until the DTD is fixed.

Doug argued that "" is a placeholder, I think it's not in XML, it has
a clear effect of breaking any inherited xml:lang, resetting anything
interested in language tags (CSS, spell checkers, Web crawlers, etc.)
to their default "no language specified" behaviour.

It's IMO perfectly okay to have very different styles for "i-default",
"und", "zxx", "art", "mul", etc.   With "" meaning "none of those".

Frank