'EN' part of DOCTYPE

Hi,

I am wondering about the 'EN' part of the usual DOCTYPE
types mentioned in the HTML specification.

Seing 'EN' in such a place immediately makes me think
'ISO identifier for the English language'.

I am no SGML gooroo, but it would seem to me that this
means that my Danish documents should have 'DA' there.

Since almost all documents I have seen just use
the standard HTML 4 'EN' DTD DOCTYPE, I tried looking
for people like me through big search engines -
not a very scientific method since they have lots
of DWIM features which get in the way - and I did find
a small number (on the order of 100 or so) documents
with the language code for the content language
in the DOCTYPE tag.

The HTML 4 specification doesn't say anything other
than 'just put this bit in' and I have been unable
to find out more in the morass of SGML-related
documents that I have skimmed through.

The only alternative I can think of is that perhaps
it is a code for the language the DTD in question
is written in, but that seems weird for something
that is intended to be read by a program.

Could someone clarify this?

Thanks.


-- 
Soren

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 1998 12:05:23 UTC