- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2003 01:17:54 -0500 (EST)
- To: Roberto Scano - IWA/HWG <rscano@iwa-italy.org>
- Cc: WCAG List <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Hi, I would prefer "where the lagnuage is declared in markup" or something similar. Some user agents can determine some languages heuristically, and any user agent could in principle learn to pick them all like that (it's a fairly simple bit of programming - look up words against a multi-lingual dictionary...). I have seen it implemented in a four- or five-year-old mail client that picks swedish, finnish and english for voice presentation. Whether we insist on using the lang / xml:lang attribute in XHTML and cie is a detail that needs to be thought about. On the one hand it puts us back into the territory that gives us problems with "until user agents..." requirements. On the other hand, the fact that Jaws can pick between a handful of languages that it knows isn't sufficient reason to tell people that languages can be automatically determined in general. There are various techniques. And there is a clear argument that if you use code according to specification, then for HTML you are automatically required to mark up the language. But it isn't an argument I would expect everyone to find obviously convincing, unless the group was prepared to write down this interpretation of it. Cheers Chaals On Sun, 23 Nov 2003, Roberto Scano - IWA/HWG wrote: > >Hi, >"programmatically" don't is good for "non english" people.... > >I suggest to change the guideline text with: > >"create contents where the language can be determined by the User Agent" > > > Charles McCathieNevile http://www.w3.org/People/Charles tel: +61 409 134 136 SWAD-E http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Europe fax(france): +33 4 92 38 78 22 Post: 21 Mitchell street, FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia or W3C, 2004 Route des Lucioles, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Monday, 24 November 2003 11:54:04 UTC