Doug Ewell wrote:
> A language tag denotes one language.
For suitable values for "one" and "language", yes.
> A protocol may define ways to
> combine multiple language tags into one field, as HTTP has done with
> Accept-Language by separating the tags with semicolons. But that is
> defined by and specific to the protocol.
In the XML context, which is what the discussion is about, there is
normally no need to consider the possibility of referring to several
languages in one xml:lang attribute. The reason is that for
mixed-language content, XML lets (and even encourages, so to say) you to
use nested markup so that you can say exactly, for example, which parts
of the text are in English and which are in French. This may require
additional markup elements for the sole purpose of attaching xml:lang to
some piece of text, but that's nothing odd. For a truly bilingual
element (with almost equal amounts of text in two languages), you just
need to select one language for it and override the language information
in nested elements.
However, XML has no way to specify different languages for different
_attributes_ of an element. If an element's attribute is in language
other than than its content, you can use the workaround of an inner
element, just for specifying the language of content, but this won't
work for attributes in different languages. The problem is real because
nowadays people often put textual data in attributes, as opposite to
(what I see as) the original idea in generalized markup where attributes
seldom contain text in a human language.
Jukka K. Korpela ("Yucca")
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
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