implementing the lang attribute

Hi, all.

The company I work for is currently trying to do due diligence in correctly 
implementing the "lang" attribute on the <HTML> tag as recommended by WCAG 
guidelines.  Simple as it may seem, we have run into a few questions for 
which we are not able to find ready sources of answers.

1) we needed to standardize on one ISO standard for all our language 
information in our web publishing systems company wide. Since the 3-letter 
ISO 639 code is more complete, we have chosen that.  The references on the 
W3C guidelines show all the examples using 2 letter codes.  Will the 
3-letter codes also work?  e.g., lang="eng-us" or lang="fre"

2) There are certain dialects for which we can not find a satisfactory 
representation in W3C documentation.  Are there standard ISO / W3C 
representations for these languages? if so, what are they?  The languages 
we are struggling with are:

Traditional Chinese
Simplified Chinese
Latin American Spanish

Any answers you could provide would be appreciated. Also, if there is an 
online reference that spells these things out I would love to bookmark it 
and share it with my colleagues.

Much obliged,
Melinda

Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2003 12:27:51 UTC