Re: Re[4]: CSS3 - Define Language

* Ineke van der Maat (inekemaa@xs4all.nl) wrote:

> Here is the best way to mark up every change of language???

<div xml:lang="fr">
<h2>...</h2>
<p>...</p>
<table>..</table>
</div>

Obviously if you switch between languages a lot you pay the price, but
it's not as if you can't set up a macro in your editor to do it for you
(and if you can't, might I suggest you get a better one (vim!) :)

> Yes my concern is legacy browsers, but I am convinced that for
> text-only browsers this is the nicest solution or la plus belle
> solution??

Text only browsers don't (yet) support CSS, and both these will come out
the same:

> <p><em class="en" xml:lang="en">Jean put dire comment on tape</p>
> <p><em class="fr" xml:lang="fr">Jean put dire comment on tape</p>

I think it's probably best to explicitly mention the language, so
it keeps it's meaning even after, say, conversion to plaintext, or
displayed on a mobile device or a browser that lacks CSS support:

<h4 class="langName">English</h4>
<p xml:lang="en">Jean put dire comment on tape</p>

<h4 class="langName">French</h4>
<p xml:lang="fr">Jean put dire comment on tape</p>

If you still want the languages to be displayed in colour only, you can
always do:

/* Best use a CSS 2 selector so CSS 1 browsers don't turn off this
 * information but leave the text the same
 */
*[class="langName"] {
        display: none;
}

*[xml:lang="fr"] { .. }

*[xml:lang="en"] { .. }

Although I'm not sure about that namespaced lang attribute selector.  In
CSS 3 you'd use :lang(en), and want to use something CSS3 specific to
match the <h4> *grumble*

Since we come across these kinds of things a lot; where one rule relies
on another (you don't want to turn off the langName unless you can also
change the individual language sections); I wonder if it would make
sense to provide:

@critical {
        /* rules where all must be ok or none are applied */
        .langName { display: none; }
        :lang(en):before { content: "English";color: black; }
        :lang(fr):before { content: "French";color: red; }
}

or so.

-- 
Thomas 'Freaky' Hurst  -  freaky@aagh.net  -  http://www.aagh.net/
-
The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.
		-- Bohr

Received on Saturday, 16 March 2002 18:38:57 UTC