

RE: meta content-language

From: Martin Duerst <duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp>
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:24:19 +0900
Message-Id: <>
To: CE Whitehead <cewcathar@hotmail.com>, HTML WG <public-html@w3.org>, "www-international@w3.org"<www-international@w3.org>

At 01:12 08/08/27, CE Whitehead wrote:
>Hi, I'm sure I'm not following something because of limited computer time; but I think it is as it should be to have certain tags used to indicate text processing needs and certain tags used to indicate the target audience.  I think Ishida's "Internationalization Best Practices" suggests that if developers follow the recommendation to tag pages appropriately- using the tags indicating text processing (html lang=' ' or xml lang=' ') and the tags indicating the audience (http content header; meta content), then applications will start to make use of these tags:

>Still it would be lovely to have a multilang lang='en, fr' tag for the server in the case of a page which was designed to say teach French to English speakers or vice versa (English to French) where the content was in two languages, or for a page aimed at bilinguals in say Spanish and English where for whatever reason content was in both languages (a bilingual reading assessment or something that needed to be in both).

>This is for a page where the content is for speakers who absolutely have some sort of grasp of both languages and where a priority list would not make sense.

Oh, so this would be yet another semantic for language lists,
so that we now have:
>> - Alternative, unclear (e.g. <span multilang='en, fr'>cat</span>)
>> - Alternative, both (e.g. <span multilang='en, fr'>excellent</span>;
>> sure there are better examples)
>> - Summary (e.g. <p multilang='en, fr'>He said "Oui"</p>
- Conjunction: reader has to understand both/all languages to read the text

I'm sure somebody like Asmus could come up with a much longer list.
This shows that language lists are tricky if not carefully defined.

Regards,   Martin.

Received on Wednesday, 27 August 2008 03:17:20 GMT
