XML News from Wednesday, March 2, 2005

The W3C Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group has updated the working draft of Authoring Techniques for XHTML & HTML Internationalization: Specifying the language of content 1.0. According to the draft, "Specifying the language of content is useful for a wide number of applications, from linguistically sensitive searching to applying language-specific display properties. In some cases the potential applications for language information are still waiting for implementations to catch up, whereas in others, such as detection of language by voice browsers, it is a necessity today. Marking up language information is something that can and should be done today. Without it, it is not possible to take advantage of any of these applications. This document is one of a series of documents providing HTML authors with techniques for developing internationalized HTML using XHTML 1.0 or HTML 4.01, supported by CSS1, CSS2 and some aspects of CSS3. It focuses specifically on advice about specifying the language of content." This advice is summarized in 16 techniques:

• Technique 1: Always declare language in the html tag
• Technique 2: html declarations for multilingual docs
• Technique 3: Declare language changes inside the document
• Technique 4: Should I use the lang or xml:lang attribute?
• Technique 5: Don't use Content-Language for text-processing
• Technique 6: Don't use the body tag rather than the html tag
• Technique 8: Use HTTP or the Content-Language meta tag for metadata
• Technique 9: Provide a comma-separated list of languages
• Technique 10: Division of multilingual docs
• Technique 11: Use RFC3066
• Technique 12: Use short language codes
• Technique 13: Use Hans and Hant codes
• Technique 14: Pros and cons of identifying the language
• Technique 15: Using hreflang with CSS
• Technique 16: Don't use flags to indicate languages