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What's the difference between these two meta-tags

<meta http-equiv="Content-Language" content="de, en"/>
<meta name="language" content="de, en">

Are they both needed?

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1 Answer

up vote 11 down vote accepted

Content-language is going away soon (note the big red "obsolete"), and I'm not sure language was ever official. The W3C recommends this instead:

<html lang="en">

The lang attribute works with most tags (except <script />, <br />, <frame />, etc), so you can mix, match, and cascade:

<p>This is English, since the html tag covers it.</p>
<p lang="ja">しかし、これではない</p>
<p>And back to English.</p>

It's been around since HTML 4 so it's safe. Since it's just a semantic descriptor, browsers don't "fully" support it (they only need to know the character set). Google & friends understand it though, and that probably matters more.

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Thanks very cool! – oreon Aug 27 '10 at 14:06

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