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Internationalization: xml:lang and lang Internationalization (often abbreviated i18n because 18 characters appear between the i and the n) gets a significant boost with the shift to XML primarily because of XML's use of Unicode as the underlying character model. While not every document needs to encode Chinese, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Indian characters, Unicode makes it possible for all of these forms to exist within a single document. In addition, XML and XHTML allow for the possibility of other encodings. In order to make this support more useful to programs that may need to know what language they are processing, XML and XHTML provide a tool for identifying the language used for content in a particular element. While XML and HTML both use the same mech-anism for identifying languages, they have slightly differently names for the mechanism. Therefore, XHTML 1.0 recommends using both. If for some reason the values aren't the same, XHTML processors should use the value given by xml:lang. Like namespace declarations, xml:lang and lang attributes apply to the children of the elements that use them. This makes it easy to mark an entire document as being of a particular language, while still allowing pieces of documents in different languages to override the language choice. For example, this document is marked as appearing in U.S. English:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US"> <head> <title>Languages test</title> </head> <body> <h1>Languages!</h1> <p>All of the elements in this document are in U.S. English.</p> </body> </html>
To override a language identifier for a particular piece of text, just put new xml:lang and lang attributes on that portion:
<?xml version="1.0"?> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en-US" lang="en-US"> <head> <title>Languages test</title> </head> <body> <h1>Languages!</h1> <p>All of the elements in this document are in U.S. English except the following bit from Cicero.</p> <p xml:lang="la" lang="la">O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit. consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consilii particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum. Nos autem fortes viri satis facere rei publicae videmur, si istius furorem ac tela vitemus. </p> <p>This is in English again, since it isn't contained by the paragraph in Latin.</p> </body> </html>
XHTML doesn't require the use of language identifiers. However, it's excellent practice and it makes it easier for you to style your documents for different languages and for users to apply automated tools like machine translators.
Rules for vocabulary extensions XHTML 1.0 describes a core vocabulary and set of structures, but it leaves room for future vocabularies. XHTML 1.0 is a foundation that gives the W3C a start for further development that can be fragmented and rebuilt as needed.
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