RE: Problem with LANG keyword

Hello Yuval,
First of all you are correct. We are talking about potential developments in
the future. However, what we will not do today will not exist later. Even
today the number of Hebrew documents is very large and it's a problem to
change the way people think. Every day which passes without guidelines might
cause a problem with additional site. To my opinion we need to decide now
about the recommendations because later when the tools will exist it will be
a problem if the decisions are wrong.

You know, there is a place in the USA where they gather rubber garbage. Not
because it is possible to recycle it now but because they estimate that
someday the technology will exist and then the rubber will be available.

Now to my second point. There are standards from W3C which are dealing with
HTML, Accessibility and so on. Unless it is absolutely impossible we need to
stick with this standard. The main reason to stick with the standard is that
every program will use the standard as a basic. If we want such programs to
work with our sites as well we need to stick with the standard. Think about
Jaws, HTML readers and so on. All are standard tools which we want to use
and if we stick with the standard chances say that we will be able to use
them.

Now, if you want to change the standard for the LANG usage, do it in a way
complies with the standard. I think that asking everyone to add one META
which states the language is not too much.

Regards,
Reuven Nisser
Ofek Liyladenu

-----Original Message-----
From: Yuval Rabinovich [mailto:yuval@lab.co.il]
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2003 12:56 AM
To: Reuven Nisser; BIGELOW,JIM (HP-Boise,ex1); www-html@w3.org
Cc: 'shaula haitner'; 'Gertel Hasson'
Subject: 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

Received on Wednesday, 24 September 2003 02:32:25 UTC