Re: Working Group Decision on ISSUE-88 content-language-multiple

Sam Ruby, Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:12:04 -0400:

The net result of this decision is very little.

* The i18n Group's "clear statement" is not met by this decision:

   [...]
> It is also uncontested that this is a layering violation.  The I18N
> Working Group provided a clear statement as to why specific
> circumstances merits an exception:
> 
>   It really is a requirement that HTML5 clearly specify if (and if so,
>   how the) HTTP Content-Language and/or the Content-Language pragma is
>   assigned to html@lang when html@lang is itself not present. The I18N
>   WG could accept language specifying the assignment of the
>   (unmodified) Content-Language syntax header/pragma to html@lang, as
>   long as such an assignment were completely unambiguous, although we
>   really would prefer that no such linkage is created.

* The linkage which the i18n WG points to, continues to exist:
   # HTML5's language determination algorithm continues to say that, in 
absence of @lang/xml:lang, if the parser locates an 
http-equiv="Content-Language" meta element or a HTTP Content-Language: 
header (anyone of them!) whose content value is no more and no less 
than exactly a one language tag, then that is the fallback language of 
the root element. [1]

* HTML5 language specification thus remains hard to explain

* The difference between HTML5 and XML w.r.t. fallback language
  effect from Content-Language *still* needs to be mentioned in
  the Polyglot Markup spec. [2]

Options which could make the situation simpler: 

  EITHER make it non-conforming to *not* use @lang on root element
  OR make the language determination algorithm ignore the HTTP
  Content-Language: header (only IE and Firefox support it)

Comments?

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html5/elements#language
[2] http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=10152#c22
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 19 March 2011 16:20:41 UTC