Posted by Jukka K. Korpela on 02/02/06 07:41

Andy Dingley <dingbat@codesmiths.com> wrote:

> <i lang="la-sci" class="taxonomy-species-linnean"
> >Pseudomonas fluorescens</i>

Using an unregistered subcode (in "la-sci") is pointless and
potentially harmful. If you ever encounter some software that does
something useful with the information that the content of some element
is Latin, it might have simplistic parsing of language codes,
recognizing "la" only, or advanced processing that properly recognizes
that "la-sci" is a version of Latin but, not knowing what that version
is, ignores the entire attribute.

I am _not_ protesting against labelling scientific names as being
Latin, but some people might. After all, "Pseudomonas" is just Greek
written in Latin letters. But we might consider it as Latinized Greek
and therefore adequately labeled as Latin, just as we would label
"pseudotheory" as English.

This is of course rather theoretical, since lang attributes are mostly
ignored or misused by user agents.

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

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