The W3C Internationalization GEO (Guidelines, Education & Outreach) Working Group has updated the working draft of Internationalization Best Practices: Specifying Language in XHTML & HTML Content. 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. On the other hand, adding markup for language information to content is something that can and should be done today. Without it, it will not be possible to take advantage of any future developments." This advice is summarized in 16 "best practices:
html taghtml-based declarations for multilingual audienceslang or xml:lang attribute?body tag instead of the html tagmeta tag for metadataHans and Hant codeshreflang with CSS
