Re: 'EN' part of DOCTYPE

"Soren S. Jorvang" <soren@t.dk> wrote:

> 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.

No, if you want to add language information to your Danish documents,
you may use LANG attribute, like <html lang="da">.

> 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.

No, HTML 4 spec explicitly says in "7.2 HTML version information" [1]:

   The binding between public identifiers and files can be specified
   using a catalog file following the format recommended by the SGML Open
   Consortium (see [SGMLOPEN]). A sample catalog file for HTML 4.0 is
   included at the beginning of the section on SGML reference information
   for HTML. The last two letters of the declaration indicate the
   language of the DTD. For HTML, this is always English ("EN").

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/global.html#h-7.2

Regards,
-- 
Masayasu Ishikawa / mimasa@w3.org
W3C - World Wide Web Consortium

Received on Wednesday, 9 December 1998 12:18:09 UTC