Re: [HDP] Support World Languages

At 16:32 -0500 UTC, on 2007-08-22, Robert Burns wrote:

> On Aug 22, 2007, at 3:29 PM, Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>
>> As I commented in the survey: I don't understand what " Features to
>> represent a single web page in multiple languages are out of scope."
>> means. Aren't @lang and @dir such features? [...]
>
> My reading of this sentence is that we are not trying to address the
> problem of multiple alternate content expressing the same meaning in
> different languages.

Ah. Hm... Why exactly should HTML5 not deal (try to) deal with that then?

> The @lang and @dir attributes address the
> problem of including content from different languages in the same
> document. While that could also be combined with alternate/equivalent/
> fallback mechanisms, that is not currently the common practice which
> is instead to separate those alternates into different documents with
> hyperlinks or HTTP content-negotiation handling the different content
> delivery.

Indeed. But there are Real World problems with content negotiation. Users
tend to not configure their browsers to request their preferred language. So
authors tend to add clickelty-click solutions pointing to different
languages. Some (Google for example) even stupidly serve a language based on
the requester's IP address. (Or they don't "add" this, but do this *instead*
of providing content negotiaton at all.) Some 'solve' this by inventing
proprietary "settings" for a site (Google for example).

I'm not saying HTML5 must solve this. I'm not sure how it might be solved.
But I wonder why we should not even try if we can solve or at  least improve
this.


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>

Received on Thursday, 23 August 2007 02:09:26 UTC