Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

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>