Re: ISSUE-88 / Re: what's the language of a document ?

On Mar 10, 2010, at 6:36 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:33 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
>> On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, CE Whitehead wrote:
>>>
>>> A use case we've discussed I believe is that of language learning
>>> materials, where discussion is in one language but the target  
>>> language
>>> is quite another language. This is one of the many cases where  
>>> multiple
>>> languages need to be specified (another would be a document say in  
>>> Old
>>> French with discussion in modern French targeting speakers of modern
>>> French who can also read Old French)--I think we've mentioned a  
>>> number
>>> of these here too in the past.
>>
>> Why do the languages _need_ to be specified? What does it do?
>
> My guess is that for those of us that speak several languages it
> allows us to list them in preference order, hoping that whatever
> language the page is available in will be selected based on this
> preference order.

That seems to be a good reason for a user to specify multiple  
languages in user preferences, for the browser to set in the Accept- 
Language header. It's not clear to me how this relates to the ability  
to declare that a document uses multiple languages via a <meta http- 
equiv> pragma.

Regards,
Maciej

Received on Thursday, 11 March 2010 02:57:02 UTC