This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Marcos asked for a way to get the language of the current element. The DOM would define the concept and an attribute, HTML / XML would define its details. Robin suggested "baseLang" as attribute name.
This bug affects all JavaScript-based RDFa and Microdata processors. If the "de" BCP47 language code is set via the Content-Language HTTP header, and no language information is set in the HTML document, a JavaScript based implementation may think that the language is not set. At present, it is impossible for a JavaScript implementation to deterministically retrieve an HTML5 element's language if no language information is provided in the document and the language was set via the Content-Language HTTP Header. The HTML+RDFa 1.1 specification states that because of this, all HTML+RDFa 1.1 implementations implemented in JavaScript will be non-conforming in this specific case until the DOM exposes the language of an element. The guidance provided at this moment is that all HTML+RDFa and HTML+Microdata authors should specify the language of the document (if there is one) in the document itself to ensure that all Microdata/RDFa implementations are capable of retrieving the language of the element. Once this bug is fixed, then one can perform a fully-conforming implementation of RDFa or Microdata in JavaScript.
*** Bug 21780 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Considerations here are: * xml:lang vs lang * Whether lang needs to be superglobal * Content-Language (see :lang())
Sufficient interest has not materialized.