- From: Roy T. Fielding <fielding@gbiv.com>
- Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 22:52:02 -0700
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Cc: Tex Texin <textexin@xencraft.com>, 'Divya Manian' <divya.manian@gmail.com>, 'Martin Kliehm' <martin.kliehm@namics.com>, 'John Cowan' <cowan@ccil.org>, public-html@w3.org, www-international@w3.org
On Oct 26, 2009, at 10:14 PM, Ian Hickson wrote: > It's not that the default is monolingual, so much as the model used by > HTML has a single langauge per Element node. HTML itself supports > multiple > languages, but not in the vague "there are multiple languages present" > sense, only at the specific per-element level. This is compatible > with all > the systems I'm aware of except HTTP. For example, RDF only supports > one > language per text literal, and spelling checkers generally expect a > single > language per word. How is that not compatible with HTTP? > In fact, based on what I've seen of the way the relevant HTTP > headers are > used, I would personally recommend just changing the HTTP spec to only > allow one language there also, since few people use this to specify > multiple languages, and I'm not aware of any software that makes use > of > this information. The HTTP headers refer to the entire representation. If the representation is intended to have an audience of multiple languages, as is often the case when side-by-side translation is desired or mandated, then the content should be labeled appropriately. That use case is often found in government documents, poetry, lieder, language lessons, dictionaries, etc. I would expect HTML content to be tagged as a single language, if any, at some element level, whereas meta and link should support multiple languages at the resource or representation level. ....Roy
Received on Tuesday, 27 October 2009 05:52:32 UTC