Re: Lang attribute

At 1:26 PM -0500 1/25/02, Liz Roberts wrote:
>Thanks for the emphasis/italics info, all; more to think about!
>
>About the lang attribute: what if you don't know the language?  Is there
>still a way to indicate that the language is changing but not have to
>specify into what language?  (If someone could point me to where the LANG
>_element_ is listed in the HTML/XHTML spec, I would be very
>appreciative--does it even exist?
><http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html3/logical.html>?)

HTML 3 was a draft, there's no such element as <lang>.  Use the
lang and xml:lang attributes instead.

There's no way to indicate a language change without indicating which
language it should change to; this makes sense, really.  I suppose
you could use an invalid language code, e.g.

    <p>This is in some unknown language:
       <span lang="??">grrbadfasjlke</span>.</p>

...but why?

>Also, are there issues concerning transliterations that I should be aware
>of?  (Language not considered the same, specifying which transliteration is
>used, etc.)

Do sub-language specifications (e.g. en-us, en-au, etc.) help you at
all?

--Kynn

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