RE: Lang attribute not P1 ?

Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org> wrote:

> Alan is right. The technique of guessing a language by charset is a 'Bad
> Idea' (TM?). So we should use LANG to specify the language. Analagously,
> the http header 'content-language' defines a language for the whole
> document, not for bits of it. Where languages are mixed in a document (I
> haven't seen this in any US-based document. It is much more common in
> places like Europe, Australia, Asia, and even Canada

Right.  As an example, take a look at "International Layout in CSS" [1]
WD.  Charset of this document is ISO-8859-1, and the basic language of
this document is specified as <html lang="en-US">.  Yet this document
uses several other languages like <span lang="ja">tate naka yoko</span>.
"Tate naka yoko" is a Japanese word, even if it is written in latin
alphabet and encoded in ISO-8859-1.  You can't guess the language
from charset.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-i18n-format

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Wednesday, 3 February 1999 13:00:08 UTC