RE: Regarding update of language declaration tests (I81NWG)

Hi, all:

 

I do think that if even one browser supports multiple languages or lang=null that these are good declarations and that the w3c should work to get more browsers supporting them, rather than remove them from the html specs -- although one could recommend that content authors who want their text to be properly processed rely on the html lang= and language declarations in div elements and other elements.

 

Leif:
Why not publish your own test results for language = null?

I see that ie8 supports it!

 

(HOwever, ie7 may not support language attribute styling??; I have not tested mozilla which I have access to on occasion.

However that's all I have.

ie8 does not support automatic language detection -- at least not for language styling -- though it does detect directionality -- that is it does support unicode bidi -- but it can't detect Arabic language content, not for styling purposes.)
ie8 also does not support language declarations in the body element -- in spite of Microsoft Word generated html pages' automatic inclusion of this attribute.

 

(One note regarding Ian's tests at:
http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/html/meta/content-language/002.html

with a declaration lang=en\,fr in an attribute I don't see how the browser will recognize the language -- the en can't be recognized because there is a third character and attributes do not support declarations of two languages -- is that a typo?
Otherwise that last line should be red.)


Best,

C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com

From: Leif Halvard Silli <xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> 
Date: Fri, 16 Apr 2010 05:29:51 +0200
To: www-international@w3.org 

>The I18N WG's language declarations tests has been updated. 3 comments 
> in that regard.

> http://www.w3.org/International/tests/tests-html-css/tests-language-declarations/results-language-declarations#summary

> (1) "Declarations in the Content-Language meta element were recognized 
> by all browsers tested except Opera."

> Actually, Opera seems to support it. But in a buggy way. I have seen 
> that it support it for <div> elements, but not for <p> elements. (And 
> it probably has other bugs as well.) One can see this by trying the 
> tests that Ian Hickson recently published. 
> http://www.hixie.ch/tests/adhoc/html/meta/content-language/

> (2) "For the browsers that support declarations in both html and meta 
> elements (IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome), the html element always had 
> precedence over the meta element."

> Isn't an empty lang="" attribute also a "declaration"? May be you 
> should make clear that you do not speak about empty lang in the above. 
> (See below about the buggy handling of empty lang="".)

> (3) Suggestion for the next update:  This test update incorporated some 
> HTML5 and XHTML5 tests. But how about adding a test section for the 
> only new thing with regard to language declaration functionality in 
> HTML5 - namely the empty lang=""? HTML5 aligns the semantics of empty 
> lang="" with  the semantics of empty xml:lang="". But the support for 
> this is sloppy both XML/XHTML and in HTML. But browsers are buggy when 
> it comes to the semantics of the empty lang=""/xml:lang="". Both when 
> it comes to HTML5 and also when it comes to XHTML/XML. Thus this should 
> be a really good thing to add tests for.
>-- 
> leif halvard silli