- From: Francois Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com>
- Date: Sat, 22 Feb 1997 11:35:02 -0500
- To: Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no
- Cc: "M.T. Carrasco Benitez" <carrasco@innet.lu>, WInter <www-international@w3.org>, Misha Wolf <misha.wolf@reuters.com>, <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>, Charles Wicksteed <charles.wicksteed@reuters.com>
À 11:42 21-02-97 +0100, Harald.T.Alvestrand@uninett.no a écrit : >If I read RFC 2070 correctly, <HTML LANG=xx> is already legal HTML >under that standard. It certainly is, but the question at hand is a bit different. Given that we want to have a single language tag in a document (no potential conflict), where is the best place to put it? Tomas is for <META HTTP-EQUIV...> (also legal) because this is explicitely designed for HTTP servers to pick up and send as an HTTP header. I'm for <HTML LANG=xx>, because it fits into the structure of the HTML document and applies to the whole document. Although not designed explicitly for this purpose, servers may still pick up a language tag from there to put in an HTTP header. This is not forbidden, just like indexing engines are not forbidden to use the <TITLE>, some other special-purpose <META> or even comments for their purposes. If an HTML document is retrieved from something else than an HTTP server and displayed, the HTML parser will be aware of a LANG attribute on <HTML> and should do any language-dependent rendering correctly. If it sees a <META HTTP-EQUIV>, however, it may well think "this is only for HTTP servers" and ignore it. The standards do not require HTML parsers to know anything about the meaning of HTTP headers found within <META> elements, only to parse the latter correctly. -- François Yergeau <yergeau@alis.com> Alis Technologies Inc., Montréal Tél : +1 (514) 747-2547 Fax : +1 (514) 747-2561
Received on Saturday, 22 February 1997 13:37:02 UTC