Re: Priority for Techniques Dealing with Foreign Language Markup

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