Re: what's the language of a document ?

On 25.10.2009, at 09:38, Divya Manian <divya.manian@gmail.com> wrote:

> Internationalization best practices [1] states:
>
> “Where a document contains content aimed at speakers of more than o 
> ne
> language, use Content-Language with a comma-separated list of  
> language tags.”
>
> The HTML 5 specs [2] state:
>
> “…there is a document-wide default language set, then that is the  
> language of the node.
>
> If there is no document-wide default language, then language  
> information
> from a higher-level protocol (such as HTTP), if any, must be used as  
> the
> final fallback language. In the absence of any language information,  
> the default value is unknown (the empty string).”
>
> What is not clear is, what happens if a HTML document has a HTTP  
> header Content-Language has a comma-separated list of language tags  
> and no other language declarations? I found on a thread [3] that  
> states such a document will be declared to use "unknown" language in  
> this case. It would be good to
> have this case explicitly stated.

Also in XHTML notation empty strings are disallowed, so the default  
valuefor "unknown" would be in that case "und". [4]

Cheers,
Martin

[4] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-no-language

Received on Sunday, 25 October 2009 09:18:13 UTC