Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 12/23/05 02:14

".:|:." <@.> wrote:

> I'm trying to validate my page http://tinyurl.com/8ukw6
> with Bobby at http://webxact.watchfire.com/

Bobby is not a validator. It is an overrated and mostly useless checker.

> Validation for "W3C WCAG P3" fails because of /"Guideline
> 4.3: Identify the language of the text."/

That's an accessibility guideline, not a validity issue.

> Yet the head contains the tag
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="it" />

That's irrelevant. It's a wishy-washy "simulation" of an HTTP header that
would be ignored if it were sent and which would in theory specify the
language of the intended audience (not of the document).

> The solution suggested at
> http://webxact2.watchfire.com/themes/standard-en-us/help/HIDD_WDContent_G1
> 25.html says
> /"...The HTML element at the beginning of each page should
> use the HTML 4.0 "lang" attribute..."/

Sloppy terminology. A page _is_ an HTML element. And it refers to HTML 4.0
for some odd reason. Bobby hasn't been much updated for years, I'm afraid.

> But that's not valid in xhtml 1.1!

Why do you use XHTML 1.1? It's an exercise in futility and does not work on
the WWW (unless you questionably fake it to be text/html).

> So, how do I make Bobby happy without going back to HTML 4.0?

Why would you want to make Bobby happy?

If you use HTML 4.01 (or HTML 4.0), you can use the lang attribute. You can
do that even in XHTML 1.0. And a few user agents will actually make some use
of the lang attribute.

In XHTML 1.1, that attribute has been replaced by xml:lang attribute. It has
less support in user agents than the lang attribute.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
Pages about Web authoring: http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/www.html

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