[tei-council] whither HTML of Guidelines and @lang

[Martin Holmes]

On 12-11-23 05:11 AM, James Cummings wrote:
> On 23/11/12 12:23, Sebastian Rahtz wrote:
>> i put it to you that "the web" community has no meaningful  standards in this area:-}
>
> I couldn't possibly comment.
>
> "To ease migration to and from XHTML, authors may specify an
> attribute in no namespace with no prefix and with the literal
> localname "xml:lang" on HTML elements in HTML documents, but such
> attributes must only be specified if a lang attribute in no
> namespace is also specified, and both attributes must have the
> same value when compared in an ASCII case-insensitive manner."
>
> I.e. they are abuse xml:lang to say the xml: part is *NOT* a
> namespace!?!  I mean I know they borked the doctype and made
> other silly decisions but I didn't think they were actually
> saying xml: wasn't really a namespace in HTML5.
>
> silly, silly, silly.

Agreed. But I think the situation with HTML5 was taken out of the hands 
of W3 by WhatWG, who were more interested in pushing forward with HTML5 
(basically ignoring XHTML) than maintaining consistency and doing the 
right thing; the W3C would have moved more slowly and cautiously if 
they'd been able to.

There will eventually be a strict, validatable XHTML5 we can target, and 
it will be more TEI-friendly because of things like <article>, <figure>, 
<heading>, <section> and <wbr>.

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
mholmes at uvic.ca
UVic Humanities Computing and Media Centre