jan6 at tilde.ninja jan6 at tilde.ninja
Mon May 18 22:45:35 BST 2020
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On Mon, May 18, 2020 at 05:03:41PM -0400, Sean Conner wrote:
What's a client to do if 'lang=' isn't there? Assume English? Assume nothing?
I'd think only the mimetype should be mandatory, and the rest will use defaults, when notspecified...of course, spec shouldn't specify what the defaults are...
it could also attempt to auto-detect and prompt user if it matters (normal text browsers willprobably be indifferent, but audio browser could ask, and search engines could warn, which willincentivize users to put a language anyway), but that's a client-specific extra...
I'm not sure I see the point in the encoding part, though...practically everything can be converted to utf8 rather easily, making it a bit useless tospecify...
another interesting point, what specification is the lang= tag?it should probably encouraged to use some special use codes too, taking ISO 639-2 as example(standard specifying three-letter codes for languages):mis, for "uncoded languages";mul, for "multiple languages";und, for "undetermined";zxx, for "no linguistic content; not applicable";
where, AFAIK, "mis" would apply for languages not in the spec, probably stuff like Toki Pona"mul" wouldn't be that useful on its own, but maybe when "mul" is specified and there are specifiedmultiple languages in addition, it could help?"zxx" would apply for art, because if you happen to have an ascii art gallery or so, there's nopoint in indexing it fully (you can just have a list of all the names on another page, to get themlisted), and no point in reading it aloud...
there's probably a somewhat similar part of whatever the spec is, or similar convention