Counting Heads

Misha Wolf Misha.Wolf at reuters.com
Wed May 28 19:27:09 CEST 2003


Doug Ewell wrote:

> But no matter what order is finally chosen, software will be written
> that supports these extended tags, and everything will be OK.  No
> buildings will collapse if the order of subtags isn't defined
> "correctly."

I would like to remind you that millions of copies of browsers 
are in use, and that the latest HTML specification states [1]:

   8.1.3 Interpretation of language codes

   In the context of HTML, a language code should be interpreted 
   by user agents as a hierarchy of tokens rather than a single 
   token. When a user agent adjusts rendering according to 
   language information (say, by comparing style sheet language 
   codes and lang values), it should always favor an exact match, 
   but should also consider matching primary codes to be sufficient.
   Thus, if the lang attribute value of "en-US" is set for the HTML 
   element, a user agent should prefer style information that 
   matches "en-US" first, then the more general value "en".

   Note. Language code hierarchies do not guarantee that all 
   languages with a common prefix will be understood by those fluent 
   in one or more of those languages. They do allow a user to 
   request this commonality when it is true for that user.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/dirlang.html#h-8.1.3

Misha



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