HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3-2. All current browsers just right-justify text
with the dir attribute, and get the punctuation wrong, to
boot
3.6.1.2. The lang attribute
When included within the
<html>
tag, the
lang
attribute specifies the lan-
guage you've generally used within the document. When used within
other tags, the
lang
attribute specifies the language you used within that
tag's content. Ideally, browsers eventually will use
lang
to better render
the text for the user.
Set the value of the
lang
attribute to an ISO-639 standard two-character
language code. You may also indicate a dialect by following the Interna-
tional Organization for Standardization (ISO) language code with a dash
and a subcode name. For example, "en" is the ISO language code for
English; "en-US" is the complete code for U.S. English. Other common
language codes include "fr" (French), "de" (German), "it" (Italian), "nl"
(Dutch), "el" (Greek), "es" (Spanish), "pt" (Portuguese), "ar" (Arabic),
"he" (Hebrew), "ru" (Russian), "zh" (Chinese), "ja" (Japanese), and "hi"
(Hindi).
