esperanto and html 4.0

>From http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-html40/struct/dirlang.html subsection
"interpretation of language codes":

>For artificial languages such as Elfish or Klingon, it would make sense to
use the lang attribute to indicate >the change from the language of the
enclosing context. Until the successor to [RFC1766] defines a standard way
>to do this, one possibility is to use the x- prefix convention, e.g.
x-elfish.

it is worth noting that planned languages which are used as international
auxilliary languages (which are sometimes referred to as "artificial"),
such as esperanto, are already defined with 2-letter codes in the iso639
standard (see "http://www.sil.org/sgml/iso639a.html"). instructing website
owners to use "x-esperanto" instead of simply "eo" would not be helpful in
the identification process. possibly an addendum to this paragraph stating
"However, many international auxilliary languages already have 2-letter
codes. Please refer to http://www.sil.org/sgml/iso639a.html for further
information." or something similar would be helpful.


additionally, i was wondering whether or not there is support for
&charactername; type conventions for extended latin, for instance the
esperanto characters ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ and
ŭ which correspond to ISO10646/Unicode characters 264/265
(capital/lower case), 284/5, 292/3, 308/9, 348/9, 364/5, respectively.
esperanto is gaining an incredible percentage of the non-english language
pages available today.


thank you for your time. if you have any comments or questions for me,
please feel free to write.

-ed boraas
mork@vcn.bc.ca

Received on Saturday, 12 July 1997 18:48:36 UTC