[whatwg] [WA1] lang and xml:lang
Ian Hickson
ian at hixie.ch
Sun Apr 17 11:17:48 PDT 2005
On Sun, 17 Apr 2005, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> >
> > [xml:lang]
>
> I assume we are going to do something similar for 'xml:id' when that
> becomes REC? Or do the issues with regard to type ID need to be sorted
> out first?
Actually, I just took out the text about xml:id. I couldn't work out why
we'd want people to use xml:id rather than ID.
For xml:lang it makes sense, because there are systems that will want to
crawl XML documents and find stuff in certain languages, and "lang" is not
used often so making it longer is not a huge deal. But the ID of an
element is a meaningless string, so the benefits of making non-HTML UAs be
able to determine an HTML element's ID doesn't seem to outweigh the
problems (four extra characters very time "id" is used, which is a lot,
not to mention the namespace confusion).
Also, xml:lang="" and lang="" clash. An element can't have more than one
language. However, xml:id="" and id="" can coexist without any trouble.
--
Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
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