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RE: Language markup

for

From: Marek Prokop
Date: Aug 22, 2002 5:00AM

Hi Jukka,

Thank you for your opinions -- we seem to face similar problems
in our native languages. Just a couple of comments:

> I think it needs to be noted that support
> to language markup is still rather limited
> in user agents, ...

True, but screenreaders try to pronounce text according the lang
attribute, don't they? And what about search engines -- do they
recognize keywords in different language? I know that e.g.
Google performs some kind of lexical analysis of the whole page,
but I have no idea how it handle individual words or phrases.

> Note that for e.g. the ALT attribute, it is
> _impossible_ to indicate language changes
> within in, since attribute values are
> by definition plain text.

Yes, that may be quite often as well.

> people can probably get along with
> situations where they hear a foreign name
> or word pronounced wrong



> > <abbr lang="en" title="CASCADING
> > STYLE SHEETS (cascading style
> > sheets)">CSS</abbr>
>
> (I guess you mean that instead of (cascading
> style sheets) you have that expression in Czech.)

Exactly.

> Is the case difference a good idea here?

No, no, I do not change case in my documents. I did it only in
my example to avoid writing Czech in the international list.

> <a href=".." hreflang="en" lang="cs" title="THE
> ORIGINAL NAME OF THE ARTICLE"><span
> lang="en">interesting article about something
> </span></a>

It seems to be a good solution.

> In practice, I wouldn't bother. In this, as well
> as in the previous example, I would just omit
> the lang attribute. It's better to say nothing
> about language than to say something that
> gives wrong information, and it just isn't useful
> enough to add extra markup like that.

Why do you think it isn't useful enough. Don't screenreaders
read the title attributes of the A tags? Or may they be confused
by such a kind of mixing languages.

> Your questions were certainly clear enough.
> My answers probably weren't, but neither is
> this problem area.

Your answer was very interesting and useful. At least I know
that it is really complex problem, not only my lack of knowledge
:-)

Thanks,

Marek


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