- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2008 10:12:39 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>
- Cc: HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>
On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, Henri Sivonen wrote: > > This is the email pointing out xml:lang. > > From the start of February to the middle of March, 15% of unique URLs > checked as (X)HTML5 by Validator.nu had an erroneous xml:lang attribute > in text/html. (Note that since the divisor contains the XHTML5 pages as > well, the percentage for HTML5 must be even higher.) As I see it we have four options: * Ignore xml:lang in text/html, making it non-conforming to warn that it is being ignored. * Ignore xml:lang in text/html, but if it is present and has the same value as lang="", allow it to be present. * Have the parser perform namespace magic on it. This would be the first time a non-foreign-content attribute had namespace magic performed, and it would mean that getAttribute('xml:lang') and setAttribute('xml:lang') would not work as most authors would expect. * Have the language processing add a fifth way to process images, the third way specific to elements -- {}lang on HTML elements, {xml}lang on all elements, and now introducing {}xml:lang on HTML elements. The list above is ordered from my least disliked option first to my most disliked option last. Thus I propose not changing this behaviour, despite the frequency of the error. We could, if people really want to continue the ridiculous practice of writing polyglot documents, allow lang="" in HTML documents, thus providing a conforming way to set the language that is allowed in both forms. But I'm not a big fan of that either, since we'd also have to add a requirement that it match xml:lang="" if both were present. -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 12 August 2008 10:13:15 UTC