- From: Sander Tekelenburg <st@isoc.nl>
- Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 06:14:44 +0200
- To: <public-html@w3.org>
At 12:37 -0500 UTC, on 2007-07-30, Robert Burns wrote: [... @lang and @dir] > Instead of just not requiring those attributes, we could also require > those attributes have author specified values. Make that "human specified values", because: > We could give advice > to authoring UAs that they should retrieve the values from these > either from their own preferences or from the system preferences for > the author. *Many* people run their system in their native language even they though regularly publish in some other language. So silently inserting that a user's authoring environment's language into @lang would likely lead to lots of incorrect @lang values, which would decrease the usefulness of @lang in general. What *could* be required of authoring tools is that they encourage the user to specify the language, and when the user doesn't, that the authoring tool then does not output a lang atribute at all. I can even imagine that the authoring tool (unless configured otherwise) by default pre-selects that user's default system language in a list of languages to choose from. But it must require the user to confirm or change that selection. Not silently insert any @lang value. This is similar to authoring tools silently defaulting to some value for @alt. See <http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10/#check-no-default-alt>. (Given how many 'rtl natives' also speak english, french, etc. I suspect the same, although perhaps somehwat less widespread, applies to @dir.) -- Sander Tekelenburg The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>
Received on Tuesday, 31 July 2007 04:19:36 UTC