Posted by Harlan Messinger on 10/07/06 17:11

Luigi Donatello Asero wrote:
> "Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis@comcast.net> skrev i meddelandet
> news:4onllpFfi398U1@individual.net...
>> Luigi Donatello Asero wrote:
>>> "Harlan Messinger" <hmessinger.removethis@comcast.net> skrev i
> meddelandet
>>> news:4onkh9Ffhpn3U1@individual.net...
>>>> Luigi Donatello Asero wrote:
>>>>> Hello!
>>>>> I wonder whether it is
>>>>> <span lang="sv"> which I should use when I insert
>>>>> some words in Swedish in a page which is basically in Italian.
>>>>> For example <span lang=sv>Moderaterna</span>
>>>>> <span lang=sv>Socialdemokraterna</span>
>>>>> and so on.
>>>> http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.1
>>> There is an example there with
>>> Q lang="en"
>>>
>>> What is "Q"?
>>> Where is it defined?
>> Like all of HTML, it's defined in the same specification.
>
> As far as I understand it should be used to quote instead of using the
> question marks.
> But my question is whether a possible use should be to write a term in the
> original question preceded
> by <G lang="sv"> when it is provided a translation of this term or
> expression in the main language which is used in the text of the page or if
> that should only be applied while reporting a speech.

In case this is part of your confusion, whether you are using a Q tag
has nothing to do with whether you would be using a lang attribute. The
spec just happened to use Q in that particular example.

The point is that you mark text that's in in a language different from
the document's main language so that, in theory, the user agent will
know to *process* it as that language instead of as the base language,
whether it's for purposes of spell-checking, highlighting, italicizing,
applying CSS attribute-based selectors, etc. You don't have to, and
these days I suspect that browsers don't do anything with that
information, but that's what it's for.

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