Re: what's the language of a document ?

On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 8:55 PM, Andrew Cunningham <andrewc@vicnet.net.au> wrote:
> sounds overly optimistic. In practice language-detection only supports a
> small number of languages with any reliability. . . .
>
> Also I'd suggest there are instances where lang is very useful. In
> particular CJK data, where web browsers tend to select fonts based on
> language declaration, in absence of appropriate styling.
>
> The CSS3 people are currently discussing CSS support for more advanced
> OpenType support within CSS3 Fonts module. If this eventuates, then
> language tagging could be used to trigger language rendering available in
> an opentype font.
>
> lang="" could be required or not required. but language detection is a
> poor reason for deciding.

I think it's fair to say that right now, <html lang> is not so
uniformly useful that authors need to be warned if they omit it.  If
the *average* page (some random hit from Google, say) doesn't have any
use for it, then I don't think it should raise a warning -- warnings
should be useful to most authors, not only a small minority.
Otherwise you're making warnings as a whole less useful.

Received on Sunday, 7 February 2010 18:01:42 UTC