Re: [xml-dev] xml:lang how often used?

[Felix Sasaki <fsasaki@w3.org>]

Michael Kay wrote:
>>  I think though now I just realized a really perverse and 
>> strange use case I hadn't thought of for having a language 
>> identifier different than xml:lang, which is that xml:lang 
>> sets the language specification for all attributes + contents 
>> of an element, but you could theoretically see situations 
>> where attributes for some reason had a different language 
>>     
>
> Obvious example, not remotely strange or perverse:
>
> <dictionary xml:lang="fr">
>   <term name="Computer">Ordinateur</term>
>   <term name="Software">Logiciel</term>
>   <term name="File">Fichier</term>
> </dictionary>
>   

if you need a way to specify the language of the name attributes, you 
can use the "language information" data category from ITS 1.0:
http://www.w3.org/TR/its/#language-information
"The element langRule is used to express the language of a given piece 
of content. The langPointer attribute points to the markup which 
expresses the language of the text selected by the selector attribute."
<langRule> is mainly for the purpose that other markup than xml:lang is 
used to express language information, e.g. the lang attribute in HTML. 
But you can use it also to specify a different inheritance behavior. In 
the given example, I assume that there is language information for the 
@name attributes available somewhere, e.g. at the root element. So you 
would write:

<its:langRule selector="//dictionary/term/@name" langPointer="/@xml:lang"/>

which says: the language of the name attributes is the one specified at 
the root of the document.

some more information about language information and xml:lang can also 
be found at 
http://www.w3.org/International/its/techniques/its-techniques.html#DevLang 
(an editor's copy, to be published within this year).

Felix