RE: HTML 3: Too many tags! (was re: Psychology and usefulness)

Albert Lunde (Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu)
Wed, 19 Jul 1995 17:27:58 -0500

At 4:02 PM 7/19/95, Steve Graham wrote:
>>>There are two possibilities here, and I am not sure which you mean.
>>>1) You want the user agent to present all quotes in the way you are
>>>used to.
>
>>>2) You want to be able to explicitly author these two versions, such
>>>as for an example of useage in different languages.
>
>
>Intuitvely, I think that the best usage is to retain a simple <q> with t=
he
>expectation that the browser will know it's swiss and not german-german.=

>
>... that way a German-speaker who reads French and receives <q>alors</q>=

>will see it as =BBalors=AB in the German manner rather than =ABalors=BB =
which is
>the French manner. Seems OK to me.
>
>(I have an ill-defined theory that browsers ought to know a number of
>things, e.g. time zone, decimal representation, quote style, etc. )

It seems like this is the kind of thing that might be associated with
mark-up for language.

i.e. the <LANG> tag and LANG=3D attribute:

as noted in the HTML3.0 draft at:

http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/logical.html

http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/paras.html

http://www.hpl.hp.co.uk/people/dsr/html/html3.dtd

While the HTML 3.0 draft doesn't say this yet, I think we want to use the=

same language tags as specified by RFC 1766.

The 12 MAR 95 HTTP draft specifies this,... see:

http://www.w3.org/hypertext/WWW/Protocols/HTTP1.0/HTTP1.0-ID_34.html

In either case we can have a primary language tag qualified by a country
code (and maybe other things).

---
    Albert Lunde                      Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu