HTML Lang and Its Importance
For search engines to identify the languages of text content on the internet, an HTML tag is needed. This way, the search engine can return language-specific results. HTML Lang is also used by screen readers that keep switching language profiles as it provides them with the correct pronunciation and accent.
The html lang attribute sets the primary language of a document on <html> element as follows:
<html lang=”en”>
…….
</html>
An ISO language code acts as the value of the HTML language lang attribute. Simple two-letter codes are used to denote different languages such as “en” for English. The code can be extended to denote a specific language dialect, such as “en-gb” for British English.
Besides identifying the primary language of a document, the lang attribute can be used to identify a language in the body of a text content that is different from the primary language as follows: Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
<html lang=”en”>
…
<body>
<p>The content here appears in English.</p>
<p lang=”fr”>The content here appears in French</p>
</body>
</html>
Most webmasters forget the HTML lang attribute – search engines and screen readers only remember it. However, the lang attribute makes so much demo for your website’s SEO.
The Importance of HTML Lang Attribute in Web Pages
The xml:lang, as it is sometimes referred, specifies the natural language that text content on the website appears in. As seen above, the attribute specifies the language on a page. If a section of the content on the page appears in a different language, you can add another lang attribute to specify that too.
Identifying the language of the content on a site allows you to carry out several tasks including changing the look automatically and the behavior of a page, extract information or even change the way an application works. Some language applications look at documents as a whole, while others consider different fragments of a text.
It is easy to add language information when you are creating content that trying to retrofit the lang attribute later.
Use HTML Lang Attribute to Style Pages
If you need to vary the styling of your content by language, you can use the language attribute. Here, the fonts and line spacing of text content on pages will change to accommodate different alphabets. Again, different languages generate different styles of quotation marks, and emphasis falls on various sections of different languages.
For instance, when you need to include an Arabic text on a page, you can use the following style changes:
body {
font-family: “Palatino Linotype”, “Book Antiqua”, Palatino, serif;
}
:lang(ar) {
font-family: “Traditional Arabic”, “Al Bayan”, serif;
}
Besides fonts and line spacing, hyphenation rules differ from one language to another. In CSS, the description of the hyphens property says that correct automatic hyphenation requires the author of text content to declare a language for which CSS has a hyphenation resource.
Other aspects of text layout affected by the lang attribute include line-breaking, case conversion, justification, and many more.
Font Selection
For readability, specific fonts go well with particular languages. As such, user-agents use language information to choose a font that is appropriate to the language.
For instance, a page encoded in Unicode with text in Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, Japanese languages, the characters on the languages might appear almost similar. Speakers of these languages expect to see the glyphs vary in small details from one language to another. If there is no explicit styling, the browser used will automatically assign appropriate fonts. By changing the lang attribute, you will have managed the fonts that appear on a page.
Search
Google and other major search engines automatically detect the language of resources and text content. However, you can use internal page markup to improve the quality of search results based on your language preferences.
Spelling and Grammar Checks
Writing tools adapt spelling and grammar checks based on the specified language of the text content. The tools will ignore any content written in a language the grammar checker is not developed to correct. Specifying the language will significantly enhance the efficiency of grammar checks.
Again, browsers now check the spelling of content entered into forms or elements through the contenteditable attribute. When the language of a page is specified, the browser offers a better user experience.
Language Translation
It is easy to translate text or avoid text from being translated if the language of a text is specified. During the translation process, specifying the language of a page ensures that the translator tool does not make any changes to the original text.
Importance for Non-Text Readers
By setting the language of a page, speech synthesizers and braille translators can produce relevant results. These applications consider whether they can deliver output from given text, or they need to find a different language mode. The W3C Web Accessibility Guidelines recommend language tagging – which is sometimes enforced by some government policies.
Parsers and Scripts
When the language of a page is specified, language-specific processing is allowed. For instance, a script or XSLT style sheet can be used to carry out different tasks, including:
- Extract language-specific content from a page
- Search for information on a page that appears in a given language
- Reorder content based on the language it the appears in
- Apply culture-specific styling such as the right quote substitution during conversion to another format such as XLS-FO
Language tagging is rising all over the world – some countries such as the UK enforce it to ensure the disabled are not left out. When developing content, you might not view language tagging as important, but its importance grows as time progresses. However, most webmasters do not add the HTML lang attribute before they see the applications of language information. Again, the language applications are mainly not deployed before language information for pages is provided. To solve this problem, content creators need to declare language information using HTML lang attribute when creating content. When content is tagged correctly, language applications become more efficient. Adding the HTML lang attribute is easy, and there are no penalties that come with it.