[VE][108] XHTML Basic 1.1 - lang="en" - legal or illegal?

Dear W3C Engineers & Staff,

I have an interesting problem. I have to choose between W3C compliance or
Federal Prison.

The test website (still there) URL is http://savalas.tv/basic - I wanted a
website design that would meet all of the following criteria:

Accessibility:

   - Section 508 of the Workforce Rehabilitation Act (USA
standard)<http://www.access-board.gov/sec508>
   - WCAG 2.0 (Level AAA) <http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#aaa>
   - BITV 1.0 (Level 2) <http://123barrierefrei.de/>

Compatibility:

   - It would make content available to any visitor, including those of
   other languages, with disabilities, or with older browsers, limited
   bandwidth, and mobile browsers (including WAP).
   - It would not use any Java - scripts or applets.
   - It would not use any Flash.
   - It would not use any frames or redirects.
   - It would not initialize any plug-ins or programs (via embedding).
   - It would be equally usable in either left-to-right or right-to-left
   languages, and fold nicely whatever the target monitor resolution.
   - No multi-media content (even images!) would be foisted upon a visitor
   without them being fully informed about it first, including size and type.

Validation:

   - W3C XHTML<http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://savalas.tv/basic/&charset=(detect+automatically)&doctype=Inline&ss=1&outline=1&group=0&verbose=1&user-agent=W3C_Validator/1.767>
   - CSS level 2.1<http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http://savalas.tv/basic/>
   - W3C Semantics<http://www.w3.org/2005/08/online_xslt/xslt?xmlfile=http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy-if%3FdocAddr%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fsavalas.tv%252Fbasic&xslfile=http://www.w3.org/2002/08/extract-semantic.xsl>
   - GRDDL-enabled HTML
Profile<http://www.w3.org/2007/08/grddl/?docAddr=http%3A%2F%2Fsavalas.tv%2Fbasic>
   - RSS Feed <http://savalas.tv/basic/xml/rss.xml>

Compliance:

   - It would comply with all existing laws and
regulations<http://savalas.tv/w3c/privacy.htm>
   - It would be safe for children (ICRA
OK<http://www.icra.org/cgi-bin/rdf-tester/labelTester.cgi?lang=en&url=http%3A%2F%2Fsavalas.tv&showHead=on&showContent=on&ignorePICS=on>
   )
   - It would be transparent regarding privacy
issues<http://www.privacyfinder.org/search?q=p3p:http://savalas.tv>,
   including P3P<http://validator.w3.org/p3p/20020128/header.pl?mode=line&uri=http://savalas.tv/w3c/p3p.xml>
   - It would be
"MobileOK<http://validator.w3.org/mobile/check?docAddr=http://savalas.tv/basic&async=true>
   "

I chose XHTML Basic 1.1 as my document type. Anyway, I finally accomplished
all of the goals I set out to achieve, or so I thought. My only problem came
at line 4:

   - <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

In order to be XHTML valid, all I have to do is remove the second language
attribute - lang="en" - like this:

   - <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">

But when I do that, both your own Accessibility Guidelines (
http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#a) and those of the (
http://www.access-board.gov/508.htm) both report that:

   - Document has invalid language code.
   - <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
   - Repair: Add a valid 2 letter or 3 letter language code as defined in
   the ISO 639 specification to the HTML 'lang' attribute.

When I make that change, the W3C Validation (http://validator.w3.org/)
reports that:

   - There is no attribute "lang"
   - <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">

You want to tell me what to do? I would appreciate any thoughts you have on
the matter.

Until such time as the W3C imprisons people trying to obey the law, I will
go ahead and avoid the Federal Penitentiary, and suffer the indignation of
being XHTML Basic 1.1 invalid. Who is responsible for this insanity? I am
just trying to do the right thing.

I look forward to hearing from you soon. Until I do, W3C staff, I remain,

Sincerely,

Nicholas Savalas

   - Website: http://savalas.tv
   - Email: nick@savalas.tv
   - Phone: (818)
396-NICK<https://clients4.google.com/voice/embed/webCallButton?id=e578cf13cb87d903b17410b9a5453a95459a1a08>

Received on Friday, 23 April 2010 09:31:11 UTC