Structured documents and absence of language information

[Kenneth Whistler]

[ Resend ]


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>From langtag-bounce@unicode.org Mon Apr 22 10:41:02 2002
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 10:34:14 -0700 (PDT)
To: duerst@w3.org
Subject: Re: Structured documents and absence of language information
Cc: ietf-languages@albestrand.no, iso639@dkuug.dk, langtag@unicode.org
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Martin said:

> So we would prefer to use xml:lang='' rather than xml:lang='und'
> to indicate the absence of any language information.

This seems like a reasonable solution to me.

The ISO 639 tag 'und' for undetermined language should, I think, be
considered applicable in a particular bibliographic context. You
get a book to file. It is obviously in some language, but you and
nobody on your staff, at the moment, can figure out what language
it is. So it becomes 'und'. That is clearly a different usage than
wanting an explicit way to specify in XML the restriction of scope
of another language tag. For that, I think the choice of setting
the lang tag to a null value makes more sense.

--Ken



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