In the beginning (of WAI documents)

1. Suggest that each WAI html page start with some variant of the
version of HTML DTD it is valid to, such as is used on the WAI homepage:

     <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">

2. If and when a document becomes xhtml (as on W3 homepage) it needs to
prefix the DOCTYPE declaration by:

     <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
     <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
     "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

with both a public ID and the system URI. [Caution: MSIE5.5 cannot
accept a dtd denoted by http://... .dtd], though it may recognize
it for document delivery. Opera 5.12 can download it that way.
Neither allow ftp://... to get it.]

Some alternative encoding values to "UTF-8" are "UTF-16",
"ISO-10646-UCS-2", or "ISO-10646-UCS-4" that could be used for the
various encodings and transformations of Unicode/ISO/IEC 10646.
See [ISO10646].

All XML applications are expected to support Unicode. Other alternatives 
are acceptable, including "ISO-8859-1", "ISO-8859-2", ... "ISO-8859-9"
for parts of ISO 8859. See [ISO8859]. Also the values "ISO-2022-JP",
"Shift_JIS", or "EUC-JP" can be used for the various Japanese encoded
forms of JIS X-0208-1997. See [JIS].

     [ISO10646] "Information Technology - Universal Multiple-Octet Coded
     Character Set (UCS) - Part 1: Architecture and Basic Multilingual
     Plane", ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993. The current specification also takes
     into consideration the first five amendments to ISO/IEC 10646-1:1993.

         http://www.nada.kth.se/i18n/ucs/unicode-iso10646-oview.html

         http://www.unicode.org/unicode/uni2book/u2.html

     [ISO8859] "Information Processing - 8-bit single-byte coded graphic
     character encodings - Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1", ISO 8859-1:1987.
     Other suffixes "-2 through -10 and -13 through -16" correspond to
     other character encodings in the family. Order and pay for ISO
     standards, starting from:

         http://www.iso.ch/iso/en/ISOOnline.frontpage

     [JIS] "JIS Character Sets"

         http://www.io.com/~kazushi/encoding/jis.html


     [RFC1766] The %ContentType; and %ContentTypes; media types and the
     %Charset; and %Charsets; character encodings are from RFC2045
     "Tags for the Identification of Languages", H. Alvestrand,
     March 1995.

         http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/cgi-bin/rfc/rfc1766.html

3. Check WAI pages to make sure that lang is present in all the root
elements:

     <html lang="en-US">

or generic english:

     <html lang="en">

Modify the lang (and xml:lang) values appropriately for any translations.
Also within those translations when different languages appear, make
sure that the enclosing tag indicate the lang="..." of the enclosed.

For xml documents in addition to lang="..." add xml:lang="..." attributes
to the root element.


Regards/Harvey Bingham

Received on Friday, 5 October 2001 18:34:25 UTC