Re: [CDR Framework] i18n comment: Language identification for child documents

On Wednesday 2006-01-25 15:58 +0900, fsasaki@w3.org wrote:
> Comment 5
> At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0601-cdf/

> If you ask an SVG document about language information, and the
> document is inside an HTML document, the xml:lang attribute in the
> HTML applies to the SVG as well. It seems that the compounding specs
> should say: \"You should get the same results for both inclusion and
> referencel.\"

I strongly disagree.

One of the goals of the *framework*-level documents is that they should
be general enough to describe the current behavior that people depend on
on the Web.  If the current Web can be described as a profile of the
framework (even if nobody actually writes that profile), then I think
future developments on the Web have a significantly better chance of
being able to evolve within the framework.

In other words, the framework should not contradict anything that Web
pages depend on.

If the CDF working group were to accept your comment, that means that if
I were to write the following XHTML:

  <html lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">
  ...
  <p>Page with English text...</p>
  ...
  <iframe src="http://www.lemonde.fr/" />
  ...
  </html>

I would be giving authoritative information that http://www.lemonde.fr/
is in US English.  I don't think that's what people writing such markup
intend, and I don't think making a spec say something like that would be
useful given the likelihood doing so would lead to contradictory
authoritative information.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                <URL: http://dbaron.org/ >
           Technical Lead, Layout & CSS, Mozilla Corporation

Received on Thursday, 9 February 2006 22:57:04 UTC