Language Attribute

Overview

The use of other languages in addition to English in a Web page might require that the text direction be changed from left to right or right to left or might require other localization modifications. Once supporting non-ASCII languages becomes easier, it might be more common to see documents in mixed languages. Thus, there must be a way to indicate the language in use and its formatting.

Dir

The dir attribute sets the text direction as related to the lang attribute. The accepted values under the HTML 4.01 specification are ltr (left to right) and rtl (right to left). It should be possible to override whatever direction a user agent sets by using this attribute with the bdo element:

<div>
  Standard text running left to right in most cases.
  <bdo dir="rtl"
    >Napoleon never really said <q>Able was I ere I saw Elba.</q></bdo
  >
  More standard text.
</div>

Lang

The lang attribute indicates the language being used for the enclosed content. The language is identified using the ISO standard language abbreviations, such as fr for French, en for English, and so on. RFC 1766 (www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt) describes these codes and their formats