Authoring Techniques Document

A handful of comments on the first draft...

0. Congratulations!! This is a great thing, and lots of us are  
discovering that we would really like this kind of information from a  
reasonably authorative group.

1. Where are the archives for the comments list? They don't seem to be  
linked in the start of the document, just mentioned in text.

2. The section on language tagging -  
<http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/WD-i18n-html-tech-20031009/ 
#ri20030218.131124329> - doesn't clarify something that the HTML  
specification doesn't make clear. If a document contains 2 languages,  
can you use

    <html lang="it en">

or is this wrong?

3. One use of hreflang is to allow for user-side addition of graphic  
markers. A stylesheet rule such as

    a[hreflang = en]:before { content: url('engflag.gif') }
or
    a[hreflang = en]:before { content: url('OzFlag.gif') }

or its XSLT equivalent

allows people to select the way languages are represented - avoiding a  
cultural insensitivity that causes many people to otherwise avoid  
providing any graphic idenitfier - something that would be helpful for  
low-literacy users in particular, and provide rapid recognition for  
many people.

4. No mention is made of the technique of using <link rel="alternate"  
hreflang="xx" ...

The link element is now widely implemented in browsers (Internet  
Explorer and Safari are the only two reasonably well-known browsers  
that don't implement it), and as a backup for language negotitation  
(analagous to including charset metadata) it seems worthwhile. It would  
also enable easier searching for language variants rather than simply  
offering auto-translated versions. Many large organisations make  
extensive use of Dublin Core metadata, which would allow them to  
generate this relatively simply...

5. Is there a way to provide examples without participating in the task  
force? I work in several groups who are interested in this work, but  
where many participants don't speak english, which makes attempting to  
participate in an english-speaking group a waste of time. Some of them  
have ready-to-hand examples available, but it isn't clear if there is a  
good way to submit those without finding a friendly bislama-speaking  
(or whatever language is relevant) member of the task force.

--
Charles McCathieNevile                          Fundación Sidar
charles@sidar.org                                http://www.sidar.org

Received on Saturday, 11 October 2003 13:17:30 UTC