- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.EDU.AU>
- Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1998 18:44:16 +1100 (AEDT)
- To: WAI Markup Guidelines <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Two points can be made here: 1. With Unicode as the official HTML character set, and the possibility that any character within the entire repertoire may potentially appear within the document, the need for explicit language markup becomes even more acute. If it is not provided, maybe the braille/speech software could identify the characters being used and help the user to work out which language is in effect. Unicode is undoubtedly problematic for the developers of braille software, due to the number of characters available and the need for language-specific rules/algorithms to handle each language. 2. I recall having read that there is an HTTP header which allows the language, not just the character set, of the document to be conveyed to the user agent. If this is so, it could be implemented throughout a site or a defined portion thereof, and would avoid the need for a LANG attribute at the start of each document. However, LANG would still be needed in multilingual texts whenever the language changes.
Received on Wednesday, 18 November 1998 02:44:22 UTC