- From: Jukka K. Korpela <jkorpela@cs.tut.fi>
- Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2007 22:37:04 +0300 (EEST)
- To: www-validator@w3.org
- cc: Martin Baird <chuzza62@ntlworld.com>
On Tue, 7 Aug 2007, Jens Brueckmann wrote: >> a month ago a document with a root element of <html> passed Xhtml >> validation, now it requires >> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> >> Not a large change for one or a dozen pages..... > > the namespace attribute always was required for strictly conforming > documents, see http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/normative.html#strict To avoid potential confusion, I'd like to remark that the xml:lang and lang attributes are not required by any HTML specification. They appear in an _example_ in the specification, but they are optional by the syntax rules (and the prose) in the HTML specs. Quite apart from this, such attributes are required for conformance to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) recommendation. But validators don't check such things. Regarding the xmlns attribute, it hardly has any impact on any browser, indexing robot, or other important software on the Web. So you can choose to add it to get a clean validation report (why?) or to ignore the validator's messages about it. Adding it is practically relevant only if you wish to be prepared to namespace-aware XML processors playing with your documents. -- Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Received on Tuesday, 7 August 2007 19:37:17 UTC