Keyword(s): article-language-tags

This tutorial was updated to incorporate changes made to BCP 47 by the recent publication of RFC 5646. Changes to BCP 47 include the introduction of extended language subtags, and the addition of ISO 639-3 language subtags, bringing the total number of subtags in the registry to almost 8,000.

Translators should consider retranslating the whole tutorial. [search keys: article-language-tags]

Thanks to Gaston Valente and the Spanish Translation Team, Trusted Translations, Inc., the article "Language tags in HTML and XML" has now been translated into Spanish (language negotiated). [search key: article-language-tags]

Added a section, 'Using the subtag registry' to give basic advice on where and how to find the subtags.

Moved text about 2 or 3 letter ISO codes to the section on the language subtag. Changed the section title "Using language tags" to "Constructing language tags". [search keys: article-language-tags]

Comments are being sought on this article prior to final release. Please send any comments to www-international@w3.org (subscribe). We expect to publish a final version in one to two weeks.

The article is a proposed replacement for the current article called Language tags in HTML and XML which describes how to construct and use language tags. The new article covers the same ground from the perspective of the successor to RFC 3066, and will be moved during publication to the same URI. [search key: article-language-tags]

Language tags are used to indicate the language of text in HTML and XML documents, and are also used in HTTP headers, SMIL and SVG switch statements, CSS pseudo-elements, etc. This article describes how to choose values for language tags.

By Richard Ishida & Martin Dürst, W3C. [search key: article-language-tags]