Hello Sam, Here are some thoughts I have on the topic...
============ Richard Ishida W3C contact info: http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/ W3C Internationalization: http://www.w3.org/International/ Publication blog: http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/ > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of sam sherlock > Sent: 16 May 2005 23:34 > To: wsg@webstandardsgroup.org > Subject: [WSG] mutli language websites > > Hello WSG List Members, > > I am delveloping a website that can switch between english > and itallian. I am wondering if I should be using en-GB or > en-gb for my lang attributes By convention language (en) is lower case, and country (GB) is upper - but it's only a convention, and actually the values are not case-sensitive. For more information see http://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/ > and also for the <meta > http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-GB" /> I don't know of any user agents that use the language declarations in the meta statement. I suggest you use attributes on the html element for declaring the text-processing language of a page, and consider using the HTTP header for indicating primary language metadata. For more details, see http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/ are these > attributes sensitive to casing? or should I just have en > > also is the charset iso-8859-1 OK for italian content? As some others have suggested, why not use utf-8. It may solve problems at a later date. > > I would also appreciate any links to web standard sites using > multiple languages? See examples of how we do it at http://www.w3.org/International/O-charset and http://www.w3.org/International/articles/serving-xhtml/ Note that we are dealing with the odd page here and there that has a translated version. For this we use content negotiation to try to serve the person with the right page based on their browser's accept language information, but we also include links on each page. This is useful for: - people who ended up on this page because they used someone else's computer - people who are curious and need to get back to a language they recognise - people who's browser settings indicate, say, Hungarian (for which there is no translation), but would prefer to read a German version rather than English in this case (when there are both possibilities). See also Francois Yergeau's article at http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-lang-neg hope that helps some RI > > thanks in advance, Sam > ****************************************************** > The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ > > See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm > for some hints on posting to the list & getting help > ****************************************************** > ****************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ******************************************************
