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Re: This week's article: Content Language

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jan 23, 2006 10:15AM

On Mon, 23 Jan 2006, Karl Dawson wrote:

"The article is about writing a complete tag.

Well, if you wish to say _everything_ about the <html> tag, you should
also consider its omissibility (in pre-XHTML HTML) and the attributes
id (in XHTML) and version (up to and including HTML 4.01). That would not
be relevant to accessibility, but neither is the xmlns attribute.

> I am rapidly finding that these articles
> are more trouble than they are worth

I won't argue with you on that.

> at least advertising them on
> lists where people form an opinion then read in that context.

When you advertize something on a list about accessibility, don't be
surprised at being evaluated from the accessibility point of view.

>> Oh, and don't bother mentioning dir="ltr", which is
>> the declared default in HTML.
>
> International audience. Leave nothing to assumption?

It's not an assumption, it's the defined default. Although there is no
specific principle "don't explicitly specify the default" in HTML
(as there is in some Internet contexts), it's not useful either, and
it may confuse authors. People may start thinking they _must_ include the
dir attribute, and then they mistype it.

(For right to left scripts, dir="rtl" _is_ generally useful. But that's a
different issue.)

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/