Re: texinfo-7.2.91 pretest available

Patrice Dumas <[email protected]> Tue, 10 Feb 2026 23:06:00 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.tex.texinfo.bugs
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
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 Perhaps this section is out of date?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