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Edit comment LC-844 for Accessibility Guidelines Working Group

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Comment LC-844
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Commenter: Joe Clark 2 <joeclark@joeclark.org>

or
Resolution status:

From http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-comments-wcag20/2006May/0119.html

Natural languages

The primary natural language or languages of the Web unit can be programmatically determined.

* A document may be bilingual or multilingual with approximately equal proportions of content in different languages. At that point there is no ""primary"" natural language. (I tried to explain this to the Working Group, to so little avail that I hung up on Gregg Vanderheiden during a conference call. Your guess is as good as mine why the Working Group cannot accept this simple concept.)
* Some documents, like type samples, have no natural language. (As above.)
* There are some languages without language codes or whose language codes are in dispute or that diverge from specification to specification. In particular, [3]SIL is pretty much taking over the process of language-coding and has proposed many codes that do not match [4]ISO 639-2.
* Additionally, buried deep in the ISO 639-2 specification is a language code for multiple-language documents, lang=""mul"". Support for that code will be rather questionable in real-world devices, and its existence came as a surprise even to Richard Ishida of the W3C, who wrote a [5]Xerox paper that mentioned it.
(space separated ids)
(Please make sure the resolution is adapted for public consumption)


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