- From: Harvey Bingham <hbingham@ACM.org>
- Date: Fri, 13 Nov 1998 01:54:46 -0500
- To: w3c-wai-ua@w3.org
At 14:41 1998/11/13 +1100, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>I'm with Masayasu on this one. LANG may not be so important in most
>English speaking countries, but where there is a need for several
>languages on a page, (and in the wide world that applies to a lot of
>places - think about http://europa.eu.int - the European Union's page, or
>http://www.sbs.com.au - the Australian multilingual version of the BBC)
>we should be providing support for recognising those languages.
>
Me too. Since most every element type in HTML 4.0 allows a lang=".."
attribute, we need to anticipate that these will be used. Some also
languages require writing direction change using the attribute:
dir (ltr | rtl) #IMPLIED
>There is an argument to be made, I suppose, that this is an i18n issue,
>but there is also a very strong argument that i18n is a WAI issue.
>
Certainly materials that teach a "foreign" language will have a mixture.
Canadian government pages need to be bi-lingual. Many web pages have
natural language other than english, and many more are likely to have such.
The automated translation programs need to indicate the source and target
languages.
Some of the authoring tools and user agents will need to know the language.
Text-to-speech user agents need to know the natural language in order to
get the proper dictionaries and pronunciation aids.
Regards/Harvey
Received on Friday, 13 November 1998 01:56:02 UTC