[Bug 12417] HTML5 is missing attribute for specifying translatability of content

https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=12417

--- Comment #70 from Martin D <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp> 2012-01-18 09:06:43 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #69)
> (In reply to comment #66)
> > The translate="" attribute would apply to the element, attributes, contents,
> > and all. What exactly needs translating is a policy issue; 
> 
> The question when is how a policy (even if not defined by the HTML5 spec) would
> relate to the translate="" attribute. If I set via a separate policy all
> attributes to be non translatable, would it be possible to override that with a
> translate="yes" attribute (or the other way round). Some guidance might be
> useful, e.g. saying "the translate attribute takes precedence over policies
> related to translation of an HTML document".

I think there is no need to complicate this more than necessary. We already
know that we can't set the natural language (with the lang/xml:lang attribute)
independently on attributes such as title and alt, and that this is sometimes a
problem. We also know that stuff like CSS styles (except potentially for
generated content), and therefore attributes such as lang and style (as
mentioned by Ian) don't have or need natural language information.

>From that, we know that it's a bad idea to have attributes with human-readable
text. But we have some of these, in particular the already mentioned title and
alt, and we will have to live with these. Whether (and to what extent) they
will have to be translated will have to be decided in a more manual fashion,
probably in the same whay this is decided currently for all of the content of a
Web page. The translate attribute addresses a very big need, and in an average
document will cover between 80 and close to 100% of the content. For
attributes, we are not worse off than before having the translatability
attribute: Some stuff (such as excluding the lang attribute as
no-need-to-translate) can already be done automatically, and some other text
will have to rely on human judgement of a translator (or the whim of a
translation engine).

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Received on Wednesday, 18 January 2012 09:07:16 UTC