- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2003 19:20:45 +0200
- To: Melinda <geekchic@geekchic.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
This is really an internationalisation question, but since it is required for accessibility it makes sense to look for answers here. three letter codes: According to XML 1.0 second edition you must use the two-letter codes -- http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-lang-tag - and although it seems to foreshadow moving to 3-letter codes that change doesn't appear to have been made in the draft of XML 1.1. Same thing goes for HTML -- http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/dirlang.html#langcodes Dialects: According to that bit in the HTML spec, you can identify languages as spoken in a particular country. Since simplified or traditional chinese are the common forms in different countries you might be able to use that. Latin American Spanish is not, in any case, a single dialect - so you may as well identify the source country... just my 2 bits worth - there are people more expert at internationalisation than me Chaals On Wednesday, Jul 30, 2003, at 18:34 Europe/Zurich, Melinda wrote: > > 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 > > -- Charles McCathieNevile Fundación Sidar charles@sidar.org http://www.sidar.org
Received on Wednesday, 30 July 2003 13:21:33 UTC