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Re: Natural language marking in HTML

From: M.T. Carrasco Benitez <carrasco@innet.lu>
Date: Sat, 8 Mar 1997 11:52:38 +0100 (MET)
To: "Martin J. Duerst" <mduerst@ifi.unizh.ch>
cc: lee@sq.com, unicode@unicode.org, www-international@w3.org
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.95.970308114254.27999B-100000@localhost> 
> As of the definition in RFC 2070, the exact meaning of <HTML LANG=xxx>
> is that everything not marked to be in any other language is xxx.
> This can range from the whole document being in xxx to documents
> that contain not a single word in xxx. The later case does not
> make much sense in practical terms, but is perfectly legal
> according to RFC 2070.

Yes.  But does it make sense to give some more "semantics" to this
syntax ?

> A general comment:
> 
> As we have seen in this discussion up to now, there are many
> different needs for language information about documents.
> 
> Proposals for one specific interpretation of one already
> well-defined way to indicate language in a HTML document,
> to satisfy one specific information need that appeared at
> one place are not a long-lasting approach to solving the
> information needs we have.
> 
> I would suggest to attack the problem in a wider frame,
> e.g. to look at Metadata (DC or other) and see how this
> can be used to satisfy the various needs already expressed
> and the many more that will appear in the future.

Does it make sense the approach in the present draft: "Natural language
marking in HTML" or should we approach it from another angle ?

I am aware that the proposal is very limited: just a clarification of the 
existing syntax and some additonal "semantics" and even so one can see
the hard work for consensus. I am concern that a more "revolutionary"
approach would not work.

Tomas
Received on Saturday, 8 March 1997 05:46:50 UTC

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