Re: ISSUE-88 - Change proposal (new update)

Mark Davis ☕, Fri, 14 May 2010 11:13:26 -0700:

> I'm guessing that the best characterization of "audience languages" 
> is that someone who doesn't speak one of "audience" languages would  
> not find the document as a whole to be understandable.

Content-Language is just a way to reach and/or define an audience. So 
one could very well define an audience which did not understand the 
text. What yields the result the author wants w.r.t. targeting an 
audience, is what is right. E.g. Content-Language may also be used to 
present different non-texts - like images - to specific audiences. RFC 
2616 suggests "en" as Content-Language tag for a Latin text (a lesson) 
aimed at an English audience. 
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-14.12


> For example, I 
> could have a document that is mostly English with a some Hebrew 
> phrases mentioned. While both English and Hebrew occur in the 
> document, it would not be useful for a non-English speaker, while it 
> could be useful for an English speaker who didn't know Hebrew.

If it was an important treaty for Jews, written in English - but for a 
few keywords in hebrew - then why wouldn't the author put Hebrew as one 
of the Content-Language languages?
 
> Language vs Languages. It is also odd to talk about "the" language of 
> a document as if there can be only one. Even speaking of "the 
> predominant language" is a misnomer: look at 
> http://unicode.org/iso15924/standard/index.html, for example. 

View source: <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-gb"> and 
not a single language tag in the entire document.

Hence, in the change proposal I have worked on [1], a validator would 
trigger a warning saying that a fallback *document* language measure 
had kicked in. 

Does any of your comments above mean contain any concrete idea w.r.t. 
that proposal? Note that I had already stricken the word "audience 
language" from that proposal.

[1] http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/ContentLanguages


> While 
> we can't make a syntactic change for compatibility reasons, there 
> should at least be an explanation of that it is just a syntactic 
> pidgeonhole that people have to deal with.

I suppose that the pigeonhole you speak about here, is known as @lang, 
right? That's eventually another change proposal, I think ...
-- 
leif halvard silli

Received on Saturday, 15 May 2010 00:05:55 UTC