CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlutf-8character-encoding
B Seven
B Seven

Reputation: 45941

Best practice for having multiple natural (human) languages on one web page?

Encoding using UTF-8. ( Multiple languages in one HTML page ).

What are the best practices to display multiple human languages on a single web page correctly across different browsers (including Safari on iPad)?

What to use for the META language tag?

Working in Rails.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 304

Answers (3)

Joni
Joni

Reputation: 111369

If you are mixing right-to-left languages (arabic, hebrew) with left-to-right languages you need to declare the direction of text blocks. If most of the text is left-to-right you only need to declare the right-to-left paragraphs:

<html dir="ltr">
    <p>English text</p>
    <p dir="rtl">العربية text</p> <!-- should render as "text العربية" -->
</html>

Declaring the language is not as important, as tripleee and Jukka say.

Upvotes: 1

Jukka K. Korpela
Jukka K. Korpela

Reputation: 201866

You don’t need anything special. Indicating the language in markup is not needed for rendering. It is mostly a matter of principle only, but if you wish to use it, simply use <html lang="..."> to indicate the dominant language and the lang attribute specifying another language for any block containing text in another languge.

Upvotes: 1

tripleee
tripleee

Reputation: 189910

Don't declare a language for the entire page if it doesn't make sense. Instead, use a HTML lang attribute for each div or span or what have you.

It's rare for sites to use detailed language annotations (and rarer still for them to be consistent and accurate) but I believe this would constitute best current practice.

Upvotes: 4

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