Use of LANG attribute

On several occasions, the importance of advising authors to make
appropriate use of the HTML LANG attribute to identify fragments or
passages of text in different languages, has been mentioned. However, it
has still not found its way into the page author guidelines. Not only does
the language in which each part of the text is written need to be
identified so that appropriate text to speech or braille coding algorithms
can be used; it is also, as I understand from comments made at the WWW7
conference, required by automatic translation software.

An appropriate suggestion should be added to the guidelines, classified as
"new" and "recommended". The rationale should include a brief mention of
speech synthesizers, braille software and automated translation tools.

Received on Sunday, 19 April 1998 19:51:02 UTC