Re: Internationalisation of html4

At 14:02 6/01/99 +0100, YOSR.BENALAYA@email.afnor.fr wrote:
>
>Hi there,
>I need to write(and read from) on the same html page in diffrent languages
(example: french and greek).
>I thougt knowing that in html4 there is 'Lang' attribute that indicate to
the browser the language of the text. is this suffcient to accopmplish what
i need, 

To identify the language, yes.

or must i add entities of the non latin languages or some thing else ??

HTML has no inherent relationship between language and characters.
How characters are written depends on the encoding, the language is
irrelevant. 

You can encode your document in iso-8859-1, then you have to encode 
all Greek letters with either numerical references or entitities.

If you have more than a few words in Greek, it would make more sense 
to encode the document in iso-8859-7 which allows encoding Greek 
and Latin characters as single bytes, and then only the accented Latin
letters that are used in French should be encoded by numerical 
reference or entities. 

>Are browsers capable of writing two languages on the same html page ?

Browsers don't do nowadays anything special with the lang
attribute. 

Concerning the support for presenting characters correctly, I am 
afraid that there are many browsers in use that will show in error 
some Greek letter instead of "a with an acute accent" when you write 
á in a iso-8859-7 document.

Regards,
Nir Dagan
Assistant Professor of Economics
Universidad Pompeu Fabra
Ramon Trias Fargas 25
08005 Barcelona
Spain

http://www.nirdagan.com
mailto:nir@nirdagan.com

"There is nothing quite so practical as a good theory." 
-- A. Einstein

Received on Wednesday, 6 January 1999 12:38:19 UTC