Language Specification
Authors are strongly urged to specify the language for all HTML and XHTML documents. To specify a language
for XHTML documents, use the xml:lang
attribute in the html root element.
HTML documents use the lang attribute
for the same purpose . To ensure backward compatibility, the convention is
simply to use both attributes, as shown in this example, which specifies
the language of the document as French.
<htmlxml:lang="fr" lang="fr" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >Tip
Users can set language preferences in their browsers. This language preference information is passed to the server when the user makes a request for a document. The server may use it to return a document in the preferred language if there is a document available that matches the language description.
The language attributes may be used in a particular element to override the language declaration for the document. In this example, a long quotation is provided in Norwegian.
<blockquotexml:lang="no" lang="no">...</blockquote>Get Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
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