RE: meta content-language

> 
> 3) The HTML attribute can contain only one language, hence one
> cannot label multilingual files.
> 

The HTML attribute can contain only one language. That's because any given sequence of human-readable (natural language) text will be in one language, even in a multilingual document and <html> is the outermost element in an HTML document (thus, the default text processing language for that document). Embedded elements, including <span>, are used to indicate runs of other languages. 

Hence all this discussion of the difference between the metadata about the intended audience of the whole document (such as <meta>) and the document processing language (which applies to spans or runs of text within that document). The language attributes of the html element can be used perfectly well with a multilingual file, but they do NOT declare what language may occur within that document.

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.

Received on Thursday, 28 August 2008 21:11:59 UTC