Re: what's the language of a document ?

On Feb 7, 2010, at 20:01, Aryeh Gregor wrote:

> I think it's fair to say that right now, <html lang> is not so
> uniformly useful that authors need to be warned if they omit it.  If
> the *average* page (some random hit from Google, say) doesn't have any
> use for it, then I don't think it should raise a warning -- warnings
> should be useful to most authors, not only a small minority.
> Otherwise you're making warnings as a whole less useful.

Moreover, making validators emit a message (of any kind) about the absence of a language declaration is likely to lead to authoring tools putting in a placeholder in order to silence validators. As a result, at least "en" and "en-US" can often be taken to mean "placeholder".

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 13:06:51 UTC