[Juser] Language tags

Wed Oct 31 14:37:28 CDT 2007

Hello list,

I have a question concerning language tags.

In (X)HTML, you can specify the language for a specific paragraph or word via 
the lang attribute of XML, e.g.

<p xml:lang="de" lang="de">Guten Morgen</p>

This is almost really necessary for Han characters, which were unified in 
Unicode. Characters, which look different in China or Japan have the same 
codepoint but have a different appearance controlled via the xml:lang 
attribute. In (X)HTML, the Browser will then choose an appropriate font for 
the characters.

I wonder if this is also possible in Jabber? Because Jabber is an XML 
protocol, I think it should be generally possible to include the language tag 
in a message? Maybe just like <body xml:lang="ja"> and so on. I tried this, 
but my client did not change anything (ok, I’m using Kopete, maybe it doesn’t 
support this). But this would then change the language for the entire 
message, I’d need to change the language for specific words.

I sometimes have the problem, that I am chatting with someone about Chinese 
and Japanese characters, but we can’t say „This is the way it looks in 
Chinese and that way in Japanese“, because the application uses the same font 
for all characters.

Also, if I chat with a Japanese person, I would like to see a Japanese font, 
but when I’m chatting with a Chinese, I would like a Chinese font.

Is this maybe possible? Kopete doesn’t seem to have this feature. Does anyone 
know of a Jabber client which would support this (given that the Jabber 
protocol supports this)?

Thanks
Gerrit Sangel