[whatwg] [WA1] lang and xml:lang

[Ian Hickson]

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
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