RE: ISSUE-88 / Re: what's the language of a document ?

Hi!  My comments are below.

RE: ISSUE-88 / Re: what's the language of a document ?
From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> 
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 2010 01:14:27 +0000 (UTC)
> Could you elaborate on what use cases this would be intended to address? I 
> don't understand why authors would want to do this.

> Also, note that using http-equiv is not setting metadata. It's setting 
> pragma directives for the user agent. 
Yes, I guess you are right here, because the browser is only set to specify one language normally (though I've got an ordered list of language preferences in mine and so my browser is set to retrieve documents targeting several language--although normally I guess the browser preferences are used to select a page in one or another language when a page has been translated into several languages; these are not so much designed to retrieve bilingual pages but I suppose in future uses they might do so as well as retrieving pages in one language).

> If there is a solid use case here 
> for document-wide metadata concerning languages, we can certainly handle 
> it, but it would be best to handle it using the dedicated metadata 
> mechanisms (<meta name>, microdata, RDFa, a dedicated attribute like 
> lang="", or some other such mechanism.)
A use case we've discussed I believe is that of language learning materials, where discussion is in one language but the target language is quite another language.  This is one of the many cases where multiple languages need to be specified
(another would be a document say in Old French with discussion in modern French targeting speakers of modern French who can also read Old French)--I think we've mentioned a number of these here too in the past.

 

So don't change the meta element inside the document at least (I have so many pages where I've listed several languages in that element).

 

Thanks.
Best,

C. E. Whitehead
cewcathar@hotmail.com

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