Internationalization or 'i18n' (lang, dir)

The i18n attributes help in the internationalization of the web by letting a developer specify language and text direction (left-to-right or right-to-left) of an element and its text.

Related elements:

lang attribute:

All elements but BASE, BR, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME, PARAM, SCRIPT

dir attribute:

All elements but BASE, BR, FRAME, FRAMESET, IFRAME, PARAM, SCRIPT

Attribute characteristics and purpose:

lang attribute:

helps browsers and search engines in various ways (better detection of cultural practices), helps speech synthesizers, helps spelling and grammar checkers, etc...

dir attribute:

specifies the direction of the text
in combination with the <bdo> element dir attribute is required while all other usage is implied
direction is inherited and may be overridden
possible values are "ltr" and "rtl"; default value is "ltr" (left-to-right)

Example

HTML i18n attributes:

<html>

<head>
<title>HTML tutorial</title>
</head> 

<body>

<p lang="en">English text goes like this...</p><br />
<p lang="ar" dir="rtl">Let's imaging some Arabic text here...</p>
<p lang="ar" dir="rtl">Let's imaging some other <span lang="en" dir="rtl">Arabic</span> text here...</p><br />
<p style="font-size:80%; font-weight:bold">note: Last paragraph has nested language and direction change (with the &lt;span&gt; element)</p>

</body>

</html

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Internationalization or 'i18n' (lang, dir)

Related elements:

Attribute characteristics and purpose:

Example

HTML i18n attributes:

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