On 10/20/06, Mike Schinkel <mikeschinkel at gmail.com> wrote: > Question: How does a human currently interpret a website that is have values > such as 1,000ドル when it it was designed by a US company with US customers in > mind? Is there something in the HTTP headers that makes this explicit that a > machine could read, or does the Argentine viewing the web page just have to > figure it out in context? If not, then we'd need a page-global currency > seperator too... The @lang attribute specifies an ISO639[1] or ISO3166[2] country code for the element it's applied to (and any descendant elements. The W3C recommend[3] that the HTML element have this for every page. You could easily, for instance have: <html lang="en-gb"> [...] <p>This product is 1,000ドル (<span lang="fr-pr">1.500€</span>)</p> [...] </html> And hopefully a user agent would know how to parse the numbers. @lang also has benefits for things like screen readers and so on. -Ciaran McNulty [1] http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso639.txt [2] http://ftp.ics.uci.edu/pub/ietf/http/related/iso3166.txt [3] http://www.w3.org/International/O-HTML-tags.html