RE: XHTML: Suggestion to add a attribute for multi language documents

Actually, any language can be multilingual...even an English document. For example,
 
<p xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US">Spelling of words between the US and UK are different. For example, the American spelling for "color" is <span xml:lang="en-UK" lang="en-UK">"colour"</span>.</p>
 
I'm not sure that there is any benefit from labeling the document as being multilingual. However, it is really sad that we need to tags (or do we need three [lang(en-UK)]?) to indicate the language.
 
Of course the properties are only as good as the author and we need to render the content in the UA to the extent possible, regardless of the language assigned.
 
Paul

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From: www-html-request@w3.org on behalf of Matthias Mauch
Sent: Sun 4/16/2006 3:37 AM
To: www-html@w3.org
Subject: XHTML: Suggestion to add a attribute for multi language documents




If an XHTML document have following language attribute

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

it's possible that this document uses english language. But if the
content uses english and german language there ist no language
attribute for multi language. At present the only way to do this
is to define in the DocType the first language

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

and switch in the content with

<span lang="de" xml:lang="den">

to the german part. This should works with screenreaders. Is it
possible the add an attribute who defines a document as multi
language?

Received on Saturday, 15 April 2006 22:10:31 UTC