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

Ian Hickson ian at hixie.ch
Tue Aug 12 03:18:19 PDT 2008


On Fri, 1 Dec 2006, Michel Fortin wrote:
> 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.

The above is more intended for implementors than authors, so to call this 
out earlier and hopefully more obviously for authors, I changed an earlier 
instance of the string "xml:lang" to read:

   The xml:lang attribute (that is, the lang attribute with the xml prefix 
   in the http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace namespace) is defined in 
   XML. [XML]

Let me know if that's ok.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'


More information about the whatwg mailing list