[whatwg] Video feedback

Tab Atkins Jr. jackalmage at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 21:02:28 PDT 2011


On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Glenn Maynard <glenn at zewt.org> wrote:
> The most straightforward solution would seems to be having @lang be a
> CSS property; I don't know the rationale for this being done by HTML
> instead.

The language of a block of text is a property of the content, not a
styling attribute.  It must be carried by the content itself.

As an interesting aside, the direction of a block of text is a
property of the content as well, but CSS has a 'direction' property.
We only added that because XML didn't define a generic @dir attribute,
so we needed *some* way for generic XML languages to specify the text
direction (in this case, by specifying their own direction-specifying
attribute and then providing a default stylesheet that sets
'direction' based on that).  If XML had specified xml:dir like they
did xml:lang, 'direction' wouldn't exist.  Similarly, if XML hadn't
specified xml:lang, we'd probably have a 'language' property.

~TJ



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