specify language as in <span lang="en">?

Andy Mabbett <usenet200309 (AT) pigsonthewing (DOT) org.uk> scripsit:

In message <446b99c7$0$15765$892e7fe2 (AT) authen (DOT) yellow.readfreenews.net>,
Johannes Koch <koch (AT) w3development (DOT) de> writes
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
In theory, yes. In practice, few programs make any sensible use of
language information.

Screen readers do.

What about search engines?

They don't, and one cannot really blame them. Only a small minority of pages
has language markup, and a surprisingly large number of them use simply
_wrong_ language markup. Typically, they have lang="en" or lang="en-US"
because some authoring software spits that out, quite independently of the
language actually used on the page. In practice, simple heuristics works
better in recognizing the language.

In article <No4bg.1748$H57.229 (AT) reader1 (DOT) news.jippii.net>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

A table column may have a lang attribute when declared using <col
lang="...">. Whether programs support this is a different issue.

Do you know of any?

The HTML 4.01 spec has some pretty crazy and unimplementable stuff in
the part that deals with this.

"The order of precedence (from highest to lowest) for the attribute
valign (as well as the other inherited attributes lang, dir, and style)
is the following:
1. An attribute set on an element within a cell's data (e.g., P)."

Surely style is not an "inherited attribute".

Also, looking in the cell *content* for the alignment of the *cell*
makes no sense. Moreover, the lang inheritance chain surely doesn't end
at <table>.

The safe assumption is that when supported, lang inherits in the
document tree.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen (AT) iki (DOT) fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

In article <hsivonen-C4A799.15131527052006 (AT) news (DOT) fv.fi>,
Henri Sivonen <hsivonen (AT) iki (DOT) fi> wrote:

In article <No4bg.1748$H57.229 (AT) reader1 (DOT) news.jippii.net>,
"Jukka K. Korpela" <jkorpela (AT) cs (DOT) tut.fi> wrote:

A table column may have a lang attribute when declared using <col
lang="...">. Whether programs support this is a different issue.

Do you know of any?

Oops. I now noticed the :lang() stuff in the thread.

I am actually very surprised that language inheritance into columns
"works".

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen (AT) iki (DOT) fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html

In article <Pine.LNX.4.64.0605200029010.2976 (AT) ppepc20 (DOT) ph.gla.ac.uk>,
"Alan J. Flavell" <flavell (AT) physics (DOT) gla.ac.uk> wrote:

I'm afraid I just found
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915

Seems to have been open since 1998.

AFAIK, that's the oldest open Mozilla bug. Key people believe the spec
is broken, so I wouldn't expect any action until Hixie writes a better
spec for tables.

--
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen (AT) iki (DOT) fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html