Note that language information can be attached to objects such as images and included audio files.

One way of looking at the use of a language tag on the html element is to think of it identifying the language of the intended audience, in addition to the language of the document.

According to RFC3066 'en-GB' should also match 'en'. In other words, a piece of text in British English should use all the style settings assigned to general English. (Note, however, that this is not the case for language negotiation on an Apache server. If you want to be automatically directed to a page example.fr.html and your browser settings only state a preference for 'fr-CA', you will need to add 'fr' to your settings. This is revisited in the next section.)

Note, in addition, that XML now provides a means to prevent inheritance of language using the empty string, ie.

xml:lang=""

Essentially, this says: I do not want to associate any language with this information.