RE: Metadata alng

Hi, Lisa. Thanks for sending this.

I think techniques like using <meta name="dc.language" ...> etc. may be
useful advisory techniques.

Do you have any information about user agent support for this technique?
Is it supported by Hebrew screen readers, for example?

Thanks,
John

"Good design is accessible design."

Dr. John M. Slatin, Director 
Accessibility Institute
University of Texas at Austin 
FAC 248C 
1 University Station G9600 
Austin, TX 78712 
ph 512-495-4288, fax 512-495-4524 
email jslatin@mail.utexas.edu 
Web http://www.utexas.edu/research/accessibility 



-----Original Message-----
From: public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org
[mailto:public-wcag-teamb-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Lisa Seeman
Sent: Wednesday, September 14, 2005 2:58 AM
To: public-wcag-teamb@w3.org
Subject: Metadata alng



dc:language indicates "a language of the intellectual content of the 
resource". 

so you can specify language by

<meta name="dc:language" content="fr">



It does not say anything about the character set in use, e.g. I can 
write both English and French using the UTF-8 character set.

It is possible to indicate that a resource uses multiple languages by 
repeating dc:language, but in DC metadata descriptions there is no 
implied ordering of repeated properties, so if you have

<meta name="dc:language" content="fr">

<meta name="dc:language" content="en">

the two languages are treated equally.  SO that is not helpful if they 
have the same character set.
However if we have two languages on a page with different character sets

we can say

<meta name="dc:language" content="fr">
<meta name="dc:language" content="he">

without any confusion and without requirement marking up every word from

the second page language.

It will help WCAG adoption a lot in places like Israel if we do this

What do you think?
Lisa

Received on Wednesday, 14 September 2005 13:48:50 UTC