RE: what's the language of a document ?

Hi Ian,

Did you see http://www.w3.org/International/wiki/Htmlissue88 ? (Which has
been submitted and was moved forward a notch at the HTML telecon last week).
I'm just asking so that I know whether you took those suggestions into
account when I read what you ended up writing - I noticed a couple of
proposed changes there that you didn't do.

I was about to write that I'm as happy with 'pragma-set default language' as
with 'Content-Language pragma language', but on reflection, your proposal
does still sound like the pragma may have set the default, whereas it
wouldn't do so if there were an attribute on the html tag.  (I know that CL
pragma language is rather ugly though.)

Cheers,
RI


============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/




> -----Original Message-----
> From: public-html-request@w3.org [mailto:public-html-request@w3.org] On
> Behalf Of Ian Hickson
> Sent: 05 February 2010 19:56
> To: www-international@w3.org
> Cc: <public-html@w3.org>
> Subject: RE: what's the language of a document ?
> 
> 
> I've tried to update the spec to what was discussed with I18N at TPAC, in
> particular regarding the way Content-Language is processed.
> 
> I ended up not making lang="" required or trigger a warning when it's
> omitted, because it's quite plausible that a document will not have a
> language at all, and because in many cases in practice language-detection
> heuristics are actually more reliable than the lang="" attribute anyway.
> However, if this isn't satisfactory, I would recommend bringing it up on
> the public-html list for further discussion.
> 
> In response to further comments:
> 
> On Thu, 29 Oct 2009, Richard Ishida wrote:
> >
> > Our proposal is as follows and is based on the text of the following
> > sections:
> > http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
> work/multipage/semantics.html#d
> > ocument-wide-default-language
> > http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-
> work/multipage/elements.html#th
> > e-lang-and-xml:lang-attributes
> >
> > [1] Explain clearly that declarations in the http header and the meta
> > element refer to the document as an object, rather than the text in a
> > specific element (this is what makes the distinction between single and
> > multiple values sensible).
> 
> Does the renaming of the term "document-wide default language" to
> "pragma-set default language" address this sufficiently?
> 
> 
> > [3] Establish the precedence between http vs meta.
> 
> I think this should now be clear.
> 
> 
> > [4] Establish the rule that multiple values in the place that has
> > precedence equates to lang="".
> 
> Done.
> 
> 
> On Sat, 31 Oct 2009, Tex Texin wrote:
> >
> > Re: [3] Establish the precedence between http vs meta.
> >
> > I wish we could eliminate this nonsense altogether.
> > The description of the content of a document should be self-contained
> within
> > the document and not in the protocol.
> > The protocol should only ever reflect what is in the document to enable
> > routing and filters etc.
> > But documents should be self-declared.
> 
> Content-Language is indeed unnecessary given lang="", but I would
> recommend bringing this up with the HTTP group if the proposal is to
> remove the header altogether.
> 
> --
> Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
> http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
> Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Monday, 8 February 2010 20:18:47 UTC