Re: Usefulness of language annotations

Thanks Richard. In much brevity, I actually believe I addressed the
points you raise, starting with a separation of the topic of @lang for
the document and @lang for changes in language (with my beef primarily
being with the latter), going over explaining how changes in language
can and will never be marked up broadly and appropriately (think
CMSes, Markdown, &c.), over to quite explicitly stating that

“Any existing provisions that mandate using @lang when important to do
so should remain in place [general disclaimer]. Similarly, if
documents are likely to be served under conditions where no
Content-Language can be set, @lang should still be preferred [which
addresses the case of no access to server, distribution over media,
&c.].”

Maybe yet another way to look at this is, I don’t argue to “ban” @lang
or that there is absolutely no point to it, as some responses imply. I
argue there are many situations where we can do without, and in other
cases differently. (And also that determining language is not an
accessibility problem, which suggests to look at current guidelines
for appropriateness, like H57 [1] and H58 [2].)

I can’t stop finding issues in the whole thing, and by all means I’ve
struggled presenting all the different problems so that even the most
stubborn defender of the status quo can sense that there’s need for
scrutiny. And I feel quite strongly by now that the working groups
should look at this (so thanks to you for doing exactly that).


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H57.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/H58.html

-- 
Jens O. Meiert
http://meiert.com/en/

Received on Friday, 29 August 2014 12:43:33 UTC