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Re: Lang attribute and "old" latin

for

From: Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis
Date: Apr 25, 2008 2:10AM

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Using language markup at other markup levels, e.g. for individual
> paragraphs or even words, is rather pointless, sad to say. There isn't
> much support worth mentioning. (I use it, but mostly as a matter of
> principle, or habit, and not very consistently. Many W3C pages,
> including pages that declare that it should be used, don't use it. Most
> web pages don't even make a try, so what motivation is there for
> software developers to support it?)

Software developers /do/ support it. JAWS, for example, can switch
voices inline based on the LANG attribute.

> For example, what would a screen reader do upon encountering a
> special character like " ΒΆ"?

Depends on its configuration.

> Style sheets, either page or user style sheets, could be used to style
> words in a particular language as different from others, using a
> selector like [lang="la"] or :lang(la). However, this does not work e.g.
> on IE 6, which does not recognize such selectors.

If you're going the trouble of adding lang attributes, you could add
class attributes for IE6 backwards compatibility at the same time.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis