RE: Null change proposal for ISSUE-88 (mark II): proposed note

> We can make the pragma entirely non-conforming instead of conforming
> with a warning, if that would help. 

I have indeed been coming to the same conclusion over the past week, and I
discussed it with i18n folks on Wednesday and got no major objections
(though the i18n Chair, Addison, wasn't in the discussion, so I don't know
his view yet - and he's on vacation for another 10 days).

Fwiw, I still think that meta CL actually *ought* to be used for in-document
metadata, and allow language setting for element content only as a fallback
(sorry about that).  As such it also, on the face of it, provides a better
approach in my mind than RDFa, microformats, etc approaches, since it is a
single, known construct that we can standardise on.

HOWEVER....

It has always proved to be a point of confusion for authors as to what its
actual role is, and as I see it that confusion is only set to continue.  In
addition, the fact that usage is migrating to include an alternative
mechanism for defining what the lang attribute already does (and the lang
attribute does so much better) doesn't help matters, particularly since
attempts to clarify how it should work lead to significant complexities
(which are actually unnecessary if lang is used as it should be). In
addition, we can find alternative ways to specify language metadata
internally to a document, where needed.  Therefore I'm inclined to think
that deprecating its use by authors by making it non-conforming, would be
the best solution. It would certainly significantly simplify the
explanations of how authors should declare language information in HTML as
we go forward.

RI

============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Friday, 9 April 2010 09:05:22 UTC