Language attributes- what are they?

[Tex Texin]

Peter Constable wrote:
 
> > From: John Cowan [mailto:jcowan at reutershealth.com]
> 
> > > And are you really going to run a parser on the stuff I enter into
> > > a document manually?
> >
> > It happens all the time.  After all, all data is entered manually at
> some
> > stage.
> 
> Ah, but apply this to dates, since that was what was under
> consideration. Is anyone going to parse dates I enter in this email,
> where there's no limit on how I might go about entering the date?

Yes. First of all, human readers have to. If I see a mail or web page marked as
en-US, I expect a certain form of date. Also search engines and other software
attempt to work with dates within freeform text.

> And if we were to start recommending that all content get tagged to
> indicate date formats, I would not mix that into a language tag; I would
> treat it as a separate metadata element.

I would agree. But if we are talking about what constitutes language, date
format can still be considered an element of it.

tex