This (and related issues) were discussed a week or two ago on the
html-wg list. As I recall several people offered reasons for
distingushing text in different languages, ranging from distingushing
glyphs (especially for Asian languages under Unicode), to
language specific spell-checking or indexing. Wheither this is done
with a html tag or another mechanism may be an open question.
This is not really a far-future issue any more. To protect me from
deja vu ;), I'd appreciate it if people with something constuctive
to say on this issue would consider: 1) reading the archive of the html-wg
list to see if it has already been said 2) joining the html-wg list
and contributing to the standards process.
(I speak as a person with no particular authority. I dislike seeing
a heated discussion repeated needlessly. On the other hand, some
more people with experience with multilingual SGML or other multilingual
information systems most likely would not hurt the working group.)
Pointers to the archives can be found in the IETF Web or via my
bookmark file at:
<URL:http://www.mcs.com/%7elunde/web/aboutwww.html>
--
Albert Lunde Albert-Lunde@nwu.edu