Comments on Authoring Techs for XHTML & HTML I18N

Hi,

I have a few comments and questions on the 24 February 2005 working draft 
of "Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying 
the language of content 1.0" [1]. I hope this does not duplicate anything 
that has been discussed previously (I am new to this list).

Example 1 in section 4 and example 11 in Technique 5: there is a space in
         xml ns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
that is not supposed to be there (xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml").

Technique 1 or 8: What would you recommend for content that has no natural 
language, e.g. type samples that include Latin, Greek and Cyrillic 
characters? (Joe Clark brought this issue to the attention of the WCAG WG: 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2005AprJun/0144.html.)

Technique 1, 8 or 11: What would you recommend for languages that currently 
have no language code?

Technique 3: What would you recommend for transcriptions from other 
languages, for example when transcribing a Russian name in French or Arabic 
text in English? Use French and English, respectively? (There may be more 
than one convention for transcribing e.g. Russian into French, but I don't 
think this is relevant.)

Technique 14: if both language versions of the same document are under 
control of the same author, it should be much easier to keep the hreflang 
and the actual language of the target document in sync than with documents 
located on different servers. Something along these lines could be added to 
the discussion of this technique.

Technique 15: adding the two-letter code for a language by means of the CSS 
content property does not strike me as particulary user friendly. I wonder 
how many users of the Web are familiar with these language codes. Also, 
language codes use Latin alphabet; are users of other scripts supposed to 
know this alphabet?


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-i18n-html-tech-lang-20050224/

Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe


-- 
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Departement of Electrical Engineering - Research Group on 
Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 - 3001 Leuven-Heverlee - BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/ 


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Received on Tuesday, 20 September 2005 17:13:39 UTC