- From: Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc>
- Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 14:07:44 -0700
- To: Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com>
- Cc: public-webapps <public-webapps@w3.org>
On Wed, Oct 5, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:
> Would it be possible to add something to DOM4 to allow one to find out what language (xml:lang) was inherited from up the chain, if any?
>
> Use cases:
>
> 1. I need to find elements of a particular type/name that are in a particular language (in tree order), so that I can extract that information to display to a user.
>
> 2. I need to check what the language of an element is (if any), without walking up the tree to look for an xml:lang attribute. Walking the tree is expensive, specially when XML says that xml:lang value is inherited by default.
>
> (my motivation is making it simpler to implement Widget's i18n model, which relies on xml:lang's inheritance propagating through an XML document: having something to access the XML values above would make the implementation easier).
>
> Just of the top of my head:
>
> <foo>
> <bar xml:lang="en"/>
> <bar xml:lang="en-us">
> <baz xml:lang="">
> </bar>
> </foo>
>
> //using BCP 47 [lookup] algorithm
> var listOfElements = document.getElementsByLang("en-us");
>
> listOfElements[1].lang == "en";
> listOfElements[0].lang == "en-us";
>
> [lookup]
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/bcp47#page-2-12
It would make a lot of sense to me to expose an attribute on Node
which does this.
The main benefit I see is not performance. It's the fact that language
information is spread out over a number of sources and so correctly
determining the language of a Node is far from easy. You need to check
for both xml:lang attributes and for lang attributes on
HTML-namespaced elements. Then you should check for the
"Content-Language" header, or, if it's a HTMLDocument, check for a
<meta> equivalent.
As has been pointed out, you can use
Element.matchesSelector(":lang('en-us')") or XPath to test if a node
has a given language. However neither lets you actually *get* the
language of a node, just check if it matches a particular language.
Additionally, matchesSelector doesn't work on text nodes.
/ Jonas
Received on Wednesday, 5 October 2011 21:08:44 UTC