RE: Comment on working draft "Specifying Language in XHTML and HTML Content"

"Internationalization Best Practices"
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/WD-i18n-html-tech-lang-20050224/)

(I finally got to read through the rewritten sections; I like that the name 
"Best Practices" has been shortened to "Techniques" also I think the 
rewriting makes some of the early sections 'more accessible'.  Below are all 
the remaining comments I have--mostly some more thought about mul and 
character sets; also a place where you left off mentioning the xml: lang tag 
though maybe you though it was implicit)

{Section 3.1 par 4

Below par 4 you might discuss mul for audience language only (but I would 
never recommend it for text-processing language!--see note below:}

"There are also pages where the navigational information, including the page 
title, is in one language but the real content of the page is in another. 
While this is not necessarily good practice, it doesn't change the fact that 
the language of the intended audience is usually that of the content, 
regardless of the language at the top of the document source."

{ADD ??
"A case where the audience and text processing languages differ slightly is 
an online foreign language lesson (immersion), written in a single language 
but aimed at speakers of multiple languages;
for example, the text-processing language might be fr [or en, suit yourself]
while the audience language might be declared as mul (multiple); or mul, fr 
(since presumably the audience speaks some French)."}


{Then instead of recommending mul for text processing, maybe recommend 
declaring the character set IF IT'S POSSIBLE without mul; you might need to 
declare a language tag with mul
--I goofed in rejecting mul--
at the end of :

Section 5 Best Practice 2 "Discussion" par 3???}

"Although we would normally recommended to declare the default 
text-processing language in the html tag, since only one language can be 
defined at a time when using attributes, there may appear to be little point 
in doing so if a document has separate content to support multilingual 
audiences. It may be more appropriate to begin labeling the language on 
lower level elements, where the actual text is in one language or another."
{add?? and to just specify the character set???
{I'm new to some of this,
you can declare the character set in the document type declaration
and you can declare it in the meta tags
can you declare it without a language tag such as en or mul???
SORRY!!}

{Another issue,
Best Practice 3 "How to" par 2/3 --
What about the xml: lang attribute??
it can be used on all HTML elements too; is also used on XML elements??}

"The lang attribute can be used on all HTML elements . . . "

>"The lang and xml:lang attributes can be used on all . . . "

--C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com

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Received on Friday, 16 March 2007 17:26:59 UTC