In the light of the previous section, here are some recommendations for declaring the text-processing language for a whole document or a part of a document.

Always use attributes to declare the text-processing language in the html element. This will set a default language for all the text in the document. It can be overriden, if needed, elsewhere in the document.

Note, you should use the html element rather than the body element, since the body element doesn't cover all the text in the document header.

You should then use language attributes on elements surrounding any content that is in a different language from that declared in the html element.

Note: There is one place in particular where you will have a problem. If you have multilingual text in the title element, you cannot mark up the text in different languages because the title attribute only allows characters - no markup.