On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 07:23:01PM +0000, Gavin Smith wrote: > > > 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.
What <body lang=""> means is clear according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/lang Note: The default value of lang is the empty string, which means that the language is unknown. which looks good to me, but I do not know about browser interpretation. I am not a native speaker, but I agree that it is not ideal, as it seems to mean that there is something specific about english, while there is not. In a translation of the Texinfo manual, it would seem odd to me. > 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 Perhaps this section is out of date? It could only be relevant for LaTeX output, which still needs work. -- Pat
