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Best Practice N°13- LevelLevel 2- Section accessibility
Description
The source code of the pages contains an indication of the main language of the content.
Objectives
Improves the rendering of the pages by text-to-speech synthesizers.
Improves referencing performance by allowing the search engines to recognize the content language.
Possible technical solutions:
The lang (in HTML) and/or xml:lang (in XHTML) attributes of the <html> element make it possible to specify the content default language :
<html lang="fr">in HTML4.01 ;<html lang="en" xml:lang="en"...>in XHTML1.0 compatible HTML ;<html xml:lang="en" ...>in XHTML1.0 treated as XML, in XHTML1.1 and in the other XHTMLdialects it is treated as XML.
The syntax to use is defined by the RFC3066 standard in the form :
- of a code de langue ISO639 ;
- followed if necessary by a hyphen and a country codeISO3166 :
en-GB.
The W3C provides two tutorials on the questio:
Control methods:
Display the source code and check for the presence of the attribute or attributes.
Put these Best Practices to use.
Opquast is a service provided by Temesis. The Opquast Best Practices are elaborated in the Opquast Workshop(FR).