[Irl-dean] Identifying a language change in an image's alternate text

[Joshue O Connor]

Hi Alan,

> Is it possible within HTML to identify a language change that occurs 
> within an image's alternate text, e.g., "<img src='council.png' 
> alt='County Council - Comhairle Chontae' />"?

Changes in the natural language in the document would usually be 
notified by use of the lang attribute in HTML 4. XHTML would be more 
sophisticated due to it extensible nature. For some tips on 
internationalization etc have a look here [2] and here for XML like 
examples [3].

> The Faculty of Computing and Electrical Engineering in the Tampere 
> University of Technology has an interesting article at 
> http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/html/alt.html#lang 
> that suggests adding a 1-pixel transparent image immediately after the 
> original image. The alternate text can then be split between the two 
> images, and each image element can identify its language if necessary, 
> e.g., <img src="council.png" alt="County Council" /><img src="spacer.gif" 
> alt="Comhairle Chontae" lang="ga" />

Aside from my first gasp of horror at resurrecting spacer gifs as a hack 
(do you really need it anyway)? in this example you have an image 
present that you could just give the alt text alt="Comhairle Chontae" to 
an just add the lang=ga to that - or maybe I am missing something?

Also I would be unsure whether that could be considered to be 
valid/conforming to known doctypes (if you are concerned about such things).

Hope this helps

Josh

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/struct/dirlang.html
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/
[3] http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-xmllang





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