Re: Problem with LANG keyword

Greetings,

Since I am not familiar with user agents that use speech synthesizers I do
not know whether there is a real problem here. As far as I know there are no
automatic Hebrew speech synthesizers.

So if we are discussing a potential future development here, I still think
that in most cases the LANG attribute should remain optional. The default
will be the server HTTP LANG and the user may have his/her own preferences.
The use of the LANG attribute should be reserved for special cases, when the
defaults should be overridden.

There is nothing wrong with a user agent that defaults to Hebrew content
handling a code that occupies the 1488-1514 space. But if it happens to be a
Yiddish document, there the LANG=ji attribute should be used.

Most of the documents in the Internet are written in English. Very few of
them state it explicitly. The decision to have English as default for user
agents seems natural.

Regards,
Yuval Rabinovich

----- Original Message -----
From: "Reuven Nisser" <rnisser@ofek-liyladenu.org.il>
To: "BIGELOW,JIM (HP-Boise,ex1)" <jim.bigelow@hp.com>; <www-html@w3.org>
Cc: "'shaula haitner'" <shaula@shaula.co.il>; "'Yuval Rabinovich'"
<yuval@faz.co.il>; "'Gertel Hasson'" <gilagh@netvision.net.il>
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 1:30 AM
Subject: RE: Problem with LANG keyword


> Hello,
> I'm sorry but I can not accept your answer. We in Israel are using Hebrew
> Windows with default interpretation of 8 bit characters to Hebrew. This
> means that opening an HTML file using Notepad for editing is possible and
> the file is readable in Hebrew. This makes reading and editing easy.
>
> When we use 8 bit characters for Hebrew, we add the following META line to
> "tell" the browser that we are using Hebrew character set:
> <META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1255">
>
> When we save the file as UTF-8, we add the following META line:
> <META http-equiv="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">
>
> You can not expect Israeli web programmers to use your method. I am sure
> that web programmers in other languages does not use your method also.
> Nobody will use it for his local, native language.
>
> However, this is not what I wanted to speak about. Please check the
> remaining of the previous email and tell me your opinion regarding the
usage
> of several languages simultaneously.
>
> Regards,
> Reuven Nisser
> Ofek Liyladenu
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-html-request@w3.org [mailto:www-html-request@w3.org]On Behalf
> Of BIGELOW,JIM (HP-Boise,ex1)
> Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 1:07 AM
> To: www-html@w3.org
> Cc: 'shaula haitner'; 'Yuval Rabinovich'; 'Gertel Hasson'
> Subject: RE: Problem with LANG keyword
>
>
>
> Reuven Nisser wrote:
> >
> > It does not matter if I use Unicode or use encoding your way.
>
> In my opinion it does matter because the way I suggested uses valid syntax
> and adheres to current standards while the way you have suggested does not
> and would require changes to give results that are still ambiguous.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Jim Bigelow
>

Received on Tuesday, 23 September 2003 19:11:32 UTC