Re: For review: 1 new and 3 updated articles about language declarations in HTML

Richard Ishida, Thu, 18 Aug 2011 16:47:20 +0100:

> 3    Declaring language in HTML
> 
> 
http://www.w3.org/International/tutorials/new-language-decl/qa-html-language-declarations
> 
>     This is a new article derived from information that was 
> originally in the tutorial mentioned above. The information has been 
> rewritten, and changes have been made to reflect recent developments 
> for HTML5.

Comments:

   ]] If you are serving your page as XML (ie. using a MIME type such 
as application/xhtml+xml), you do not need the lang attribute. The 
xml:lang attribute alone will suffice. (The lang is allowed, but it 
won't have any effect.) [[

* The paragraph above does not match reality: @lang *does* have effect 
- at least for CSS selectors, and at least in in Firefox, Opera, 
Chrome, Webkit and IE9 - even if the page is served as XML. In fact, 
David Carlisle in the discussion field of a bug against Polyglot Markup 
questioned whether xml:lang was needed, but we did not push it.

* The advantage, thus, of using xml:lang is - I think - that it is a 
*generic* XML feature. Thus, xml:lang makes sure language declaring 
works even in the most generic XML parser. However, for the most 
advanced XML parsers, those who implement HTMl5 as well, they do 
attribute meaning to the @lang attribute.

  ]] Specifying metadata about the audience language [[

* It really would have helped if you had moved that section to another 
document - namely to that document dealing with HTTP Content-Langauge. 
It should be minimized more. And the link to the 'HTTP and meta for 
language information' article, should be moved from bottom to top of 
this section ...
-- 
Leif H Silli

Received on Tuesday, 23 August 2011 00:17:08 UTC