What is the HTML5 alternative to the obsolete meta http-equiv=content-language.
I'm finishing up an HTML5 site that has a mixture of English and Mandarin Chinese.
My validator (HTML5 Validator add-on for FF) is giving me this error:
error: Using the “meta” element to specify the document-wide default
language is obsolete. Consider specifying the language on the root
element instead.
At line 6, column 9: <meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="en-us" />
the relevant code is:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
checking W3.org leads me to this page: telling me that yes, it's obsolete
I must confess I don't understand how I am supposed to bring this code into compliance?
I don't know what "specifying the language on the root element" means, or how to do it?
Surely <html lang="en"> doesn't suffice for UTF-8 ?
Answer
In HTML5 you can actually define lang for each element. That means if you have a div that contains Mandarin Chinese in it, just define an attribute lang="zh-CN" for that div, like <div lang="zh-CN">.