[html4all] Linguistic variants in a single document ?

[Robert Burns]

Hi Gez and Phil,

On Sep 25, 2007, at 8:33 AM, Gez Lemon wrote:

> Hi Phil,
>
> On 25/09/2007, Philip TAYLOR
> <Philip-and-LeKhanh at royal-tunbridge-wells.org> wrote:
>> Well, content-negotation for the whole
>> document is already well-defined (and
>> if IIS supported it, I'd be in Heaven !),
>> but I was more thinking of a markup
>> solution at the document-fragment level ...
>>
>> And yes, it could be done server-side,
>> but that really takes beyind the realm
>> of HTML+ and user agents.
>
> If you don't want to use content negotiation, the only other option
> you have would be to use client-side scripting. For example:
>
> <span class="replace colour">color</span>
>
> You could then write a script that finds all spans with a class of
> "replace", and replaces the content within the span with the rest of
> the class names.

I don't think this requires any additional markup. This is something  
that could be handled nicely by a browser without any other markup.  
Especially at the word level it would simply involve substituting  
British spellings for US spellings or vice versa. For some of the  
phrases Phil cited, that might be a bit more complicated, but still  
possible with no markup. A simple checkbox to indicate the user  
wanted spellings in the preferred language would be the only thing  
necessary in terms of user interaction.

Take c are,
Rob