Re: For review: Tagging text with no language

With respect to computer language snippets, isn't that what the <code> tag 
is for -- at least in XHTML?

Regards,

Karen Broome
Metadata Systems Designer
Sony Pictures Entertainment
310.244.4384



Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de> 
Sent by: www-international-request@w3.org
04/13/2007 03:48 AM

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Re: For review: Tagging text with no language







John Cowan wrote:

> BCP 47 explicitly excludes computer languages from its scope, as do
> the ISO 639 family of standards.  So "zxx" is the only available tag.

Tagging source code snippets as "zxx" would be barbaric.  But it's a
case where "" is clearly better than "und".  Actually I think "" is
always better than "und" unless I intend to flag something for later
review.  In the context of Richard's article and XML documents, for
other purposes it might be different.  The use of "und" in XHTML 1.0
is IMO only a temporary kludge until the DTD is fixed.

Doug argued that "" is a placeholder, I think it's not in XML, it has
a clear effect of breaking any inherited xml:lang, resetting anything
interested in language tags (CSS, spell checkers, Web crawlers, etc.)
to their default "no language specified" behaviour.

It's IMO perfectly okay to have very different styles for "i-default",
"und", "zxx", "art", "mul", etc.   With "" meaning "none of those".

Frank