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In modern browsers, whether or not lang is provided, the browser is smart enough to set the correct encoding / glyphs. In the olden times, browser was not smar

In modern browsers, whether or not lang is provided, the browser is smart enough to set the correct encoding / glyphs. In the olden times, browser was not smart (ie: still set the wrong charset). You may have come across for example, an asian site (japanese, korean, chinese), and see a lot of text with "?"'s and "□"'s like so ??? □□□ in 90's and common still through beginning 2000's. Glad these days you don't have to spend time trying to match it up, but it was available readily in browser's menu for you to match. I think here, the lang tag is useful so you can explicitly tell the browser. And if you are designing the page, you have more control for localization to target by the international code.

Flimm 7y ago
I think you are confusing language (English, French, Arabic, etc) with encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, etc). You do sometimes see mojibake in web pages, (question marks and □□ in place of the real text). These are caused by incorrect encodings. The web server tells the browser which encoding to use using the HTTP header Content-Type or using the <meta charset="UTF-8"> HTML element. You should always set the encoding rather relying on the browser guessing.
- jzer0cool 7y ago
  I was referencing asian languages as one set of examples for encoding. Of course setting the encoding is important (whether html or within a program dealing with strings - I had my share of hard bugs only to realize just that, another story)! Here I was just sharing my encounters of the browser rendering ?? and □□ character marks, because it did not know. The browser had a "Auto Detect" charset mode, so one always had to toggle (and remember to revert back again when viewing another page). For the very reason you have indicated, "should always set", but in those days (and maybe even today), not always set. Again, just a memory sharing.

Flimm 7y ago

I think you are confusing language (English, French, Arabic, etc) with encoding (ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, etc). You do sometimes see mojibake in web pages, (question marks and □□ in place of the real text). These are caused by incorrect encodings. The web server tells the browser which encoding to use using the HTTP header Content-Type or using the <meta charset="UTF-8"> HTML element. You should always set the encoding rather relying on the browser guessing.

jzer0cool 7y ago
I was referencing asian languages as one set of examples for encoding. Of course setting the encoding is important (whether html or within a program dealing with strings - I had my share of hard bugs only to realize just that, another story)! Here I was just sharing my encounters of the browser rendering ?? and □□ character marks, because it did not know. The browser had a "Auto Detect" charset mode, so one always had to toggle (and remember to revert back again when viewing another page). For the very reason you have indicated, "should always set", but in those days (and maybe even today), not always set. Again, just a memory sharing.