IIUC WebKit uses internally node's language to determine which font to use to render text, e.g for Han unification (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification) WebKit has to choose a proper glyph depending on its lang attribute for the same Unicode codepoint.
Matt (falken@) knows more about this. On Sun, Jul 14, 2013 at 12:39 AM, Ian Hickson <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, 12 Jul 2013, Peter Occil wrote: > > > > Well, my true hope is that such a DOM attribute like "language" will be > > specified in the HTML or DOM spec. Especially since it's not currently > > possible to get the language of a node through JavaScript methods alone. > > What's the use case for having this in HTML? > > -- > Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL > http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. > Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.' > -- Takayoshi Kochi
