Re: what's the language of a document ?

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 02:30:36 +0100, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Sun, 25 Oct 2009, Divya Manian wrote:
>>
>> Internationalization best practices [1] states:
>>
>> �Where a document contains content aimed at speakers of more than one
>> language, use Content-Language with a comma-separated list of language
>> tags.�
>>
>> The HTML 5 specs [2] state:
>>
>> ��there is a document-wide default language set, then that is the
>> language of the node.
>>
>> If there is no document-wide default language, then language information
>> from a higher-level protocol (such as HTTP), if any, must be used as the
>> final fallback language. In the absence of any language information, the
>> default value is unknown (the empty string).�
>>
>> What is not clear is, what happens if a HTML document has a HTTP header
>> Content-Language has a comma-separated list of language tags and no  
>> other
>> language declarations? I found on a thread [3] that states such a  
>> document
>> will be declared to use "unknown" language in this case. It would be  
>> good to
>> have this case explicitly stated.
>
> I've updated the spec to say that when the higher-level protocol reports
> multiple languages, they are all ignored in favour of the default
> (unknown).

This doesn't match what's specced for <meta http-equiv=content-language  
content=foo,bar>. Maybe the <meta> should be aligned and say that when  
there's a comma, the element is ignored?

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/semantics.html#attr-meta-http-equiv-content-language

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software