RE: Can we have @lang back in XHTML Family?

Le vendredi 23 janvier 2009 à 20:33 +0000, Richard Ishida a écrit :
> I would very much like to reach a situation where an author could just use
> one or other of these attributes, and achieve the desired result.

I agree this is desirable goal.

> The idea that it might be possible to introduce lang to XHTML 1.1 etc was
> interesting, but I think that the problem would be that, if people don't
> continue to use both attributes, xml processors would have to also be
> changed to recognise that lang is equivalent to xml:lang (eg. so that the
> XPath lang() function would still work in XSLT or XQuery).

I think the premises is that if you serve your content as text/html,
you're not expected to have it designed to work seamlessly with XML
tools. 

For the people interested in having their languages annotations properly
read by XML tools, the best practice would still be to have both lang
and xml:lang; for those only interested in getting their pages properly
parsed by browsers, the lang attribute should suffice.

> I can't say what level of acceptance the idea would have with the HTML5
> folks, but it seems to me that moving text/html processors to accept
> xml:lang as equivalent to lang would be more effective, and perhaps easier.

But that seems like something that wouldn't have effects before years,
at the very earliest; not mentioning that this would also need to be
outreached to assistive technology vendors, etc.

In the meantime, we're going to leave out in the cold Web authors that
will need to choose between being valid (using their XHTML format of
choice), or provide effective language annotations.

Dom

Received on Tuesday, 27 January 2009 16:51:51 UTC