On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 11:06:00PM +0100, Patrice Dumas wrote:
> > 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.
Vincent reported that Firefox treated <body> and <body lang="">
inconsistently, so lang is not defaulting to "" in that case as you
would expect.
> 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.
There is something specific about English, because English is used for
strings that go into the output document ("Next", "Chapter" and so on.)
Hence (American) English is still used as the default language.
> > 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 Perhaps this section is out of date?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.
OK.
