Issue-88 objections

Here are my objections for the various proposals:


[1] Objections to the Change Proposal to make the Content-Language pragma non-conforming

I have a concern that this may interfere with the original intended use of the http-equiv markup, although it is not a strong objection because (a) that usage continues to be unclear and (b) allowing the content-language pragma to be used for language declarations is confusing to authors.


[2] Objections to the Change Proposal to require user agents ignore pragmas that specify multiple languages

I have a strong objection to this proposal because it changes syntax of the meta to support only one language value.  This is very likely to simply compound existing confusion about how the meta Content-Language element should be used because it makes it appear more like a duplicate of the lang attribute.  Warnings are only likely to be seen by people validating their content. That is an issue with all of the proposals, but this proposal compounds the confusion by making it seem like the meta Content-Language element is *designed* as an alternative method for expressing the default language for the page.  We really need to help people move to a single method.


[3] Objections to the Change Proposal to let multiple language tags continue to be legal

I object to this because, although it provides a workable defaulting mechanism that may help with legacy pages, it is likely to prolong the confusion experienced by users creating new pages wrt which way to declare language, since in the absence of a lang attribute on the html tag declaring language in the Content-Language meta will continue to produce an effect.  You will only find out that you shouldn't do that if you validate your code - and the people we're talking about who get this wrong are quite likely not to validate.

The CP also proposes two methods to remove any warnings that involve removing the meta and/or HTTP information rather than adding a lang attribute.  This seems inconsistent with the goal of encouraging people to use language declarations.

The i18n WG would be happiest with this proposal if it was changed to say that the specification mandated that browsers must not guess at the default language for the page by looking at the HTTP or meta elements, since that would not remove or change the http-equiv information, like the non-conforming CP proposes, but would render it harmless.  This, of course, is however to argue against the main raison d'être of this CP.

I also disagree with the proposal to change 'pragma-set default language' to 'pragma-set locale language'.

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Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Wednesday, 30 June 2010 19:50:34 UTC