On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 10:17:21AM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote: > On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 04:00:17AM +0100, Vincent Lefevre wrote: > > On 2026-02-06 17:32:16 +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > > > The next pretest distribution for the next Texinfo release (7.3) has been > > > uploaded to > > > > > > https://alpha.gnu.org/gnu/texinfo/texinfo-7.2.91.tar.xz > > > > I've tested the Debian/experimental package. > > > > > * Language > > [...] > > > . if there is no @documentlanguage, the language is unspecified, rather > > > than en_US. (texi2any will still use English strings by default, > > > but will not put en_US in the output, depending on output format.) > > > > This is problematic, because until now, the default language was > > the English one. So this will break current manuals that do not > > use @documentlanguage (because it was useless). > > This is a feature, now no @documentlanguage means that the language is > unspecified. As a side note, previously, the language was already > unspecified for some output formats, see > https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-texinfo/2025-03/msg00076.html > > If an author intends to be explicit about the language, the manual > should be modified.
Yes, as Patrice explains the current behaviour is a deliberate choice. (It's wrong to term it a "regression".) > > In particular, > > Firefox is sensitive to the lang HTML attribute, and without > > @documentlanguage, one gets lang="", which means that Firefox > > will no longer choose the Latin script (I got inconsistent font > > settings until I reconfigured them in Firefox). > > Since no @documentlanguage means that the language is unspecified, it > is best intepreted as an unknown language in HTML. If the user wants to > make sure that the "en" language is selected, he should now specify it > explicitely. This is a feature. > > In HTML output, lang could be completely avoided instead of being an > empty string. I do not have a strong opinion here. I think it would be fine to omit the lang attribute if it is going to be blank, if there is confusion about what <body lang=""> means or how browsers should interpret it. > > Note also that the change of > > > > <body lang="en"> > > > > to > > > > <body lang=""> > > This is not intentional, the NEWS is right, I will try to fix the > wording in the manual. > > > does not match the GNU Texinfo manual: > > > > * Internationalization:: Supporting languages other than English. > > > > and > > > > 15 Internationalization > > *********************** > > > > Texinfo has some support for writing in languages other than English, > > [...] > > > > The "other than English" intends to mean that the default language > > is English. It clearly is. That does not mean that the absence of a @documentlanguage line has to be equivalent to "@documentlanguage en". That's reading more into the manual than is warranted. Regarding this text: Texinfo has some support for writing in languages other than English, although this area still needs considerable work. (If you are the one helping to translate the fixed strings written to documents, *note Internationalization of Document Strings::.) - I'm actually not sure what the "considerable work" referred to here is. Perhaps this section is out of date?
