[whatwg] lang vs. xml:lang; id vs. xml:id

Michel Fortin michel.fortin at michelf.com
Fri Dec 1 14:44:51 PST 2006


Le 1 déc. 2006 à 11:44, Ian Hickson a écrit :

> On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Michel Fortin wrote:
>>
>> Okay, so if I understand well, xml:lang in the spec refers to the  
>> "lang"
>> attribute in the "xml" namespace, not to the "xml:lang" attribute  
>> in the
>> null namespace that you get with the HTML parser. It makes sense  
>> from a
>> DOM perspective, but it's misleading from a markup perspective, so I
>> still think it should be clarified.
>
> Could you propose some text?

What about adding at the end of this paragraph:

"If both the xml:lang attribute and the lang attribute are set, user  
agents must use the xml:lang attribute, and the lang attribute must  
be ignored for the purposes of determining the element's language."

the following sentence:

"Note that the xml:lang attribute can only be set via scripting for  
HTML documents, since the HTML parser does not handle namespaces."

I guess that new sentence is totally obvious when you've read the  
Terminology section, but I still think it's important because  
xml:lang is used a lot in XHTML1 documents served as text/html, and  
people will be referring to this part of the spec to know what  
browsers do about them so it ought to be clear.


Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://www.michelf.com/





More information about the whatwg mailing list