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Posted by Alan J. Flavell on 11/14/72 11:27
On Sat, 24 Sep 2005, rf wrote:
> The doctype has nothing at all to do with language.
Right: the DOCTYPE specifies only the language of the DTD itself, and
for W3C DTDs that is always "en" (English).
> Language support is handled by the charset.
Not officially, though. What "language" would you associate with
iso-8859-1, anyway? Or with utf-8, for that matter?
/Some/ browsers do make certain deductions about the language from
/some/ charsets if they don't get a better source of information about
the language. I have some observations on Mozilla discussed here:
http://ppewww.ph.gla.ac.uk/~flavell/charset/browsers-fonts.html#Mozilla
- although that doesn't include CJK, which may be where the language
support is more important than anywhere else, but that happens to be
outside my field of expertise, I'm afraid.
WAI guidelines call for there always to be a definition of the primary
language of a document on the <html> element, i.e <html lang="xx">. If
the document contains snippets on some other language, then they
should also be marked up with appropriate lang= attribute. (For
example, IBM HPR uses these to decide how to pronounce the item, if
the language is one of those which it supports.)
Mozilla, at least, will primarily use the lang= attribute, where
available, to influence choice of font to render each element, as I'm
sure do some other browsers. (Unless the author has specified the
font explicitly).
hope this helps
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