Avoid human text in attributes

[michael-n-cooper]

An internationalization principle is that text should not be in attributes. Properties should be structured in a way not to use that design.

[johnfoliot]

"...[human] text should not be in attributes"

Not sure what you mean here:

• @alt="Government of Canada / Gouvernement du Canada" (English/French: https://www.canada.ca/home.html)

• @aria-label="Print this document" | aria-label"このドキュメントを印刷する" (English version, Japanese version)

Attributes and elements are always written in English. When attributes require author-supplied strings, they are traditionally in the language of the document. However, because they are flat text strings, they cannot be formatted, nor can additional attributes be applied to those values, so for example in the first Canadian example, pronunciation of the text string will be impacted by the native language of the document (lang="en"), so screen readers may struggle with properly pronouncing 'Gouvernement' (en francais).

[michael-n-cooper]

Asking I18N to weigh in, MC will defer to their opinion

[xfq]

FWIW, this is mentioned in i18n WG's guidance for spec developers.

[r12a]

It's not clear to me what is the context that gave rise to the initial comment by @michael-n-cooper, so it's difficult to know what to say here.

@xfq 's link certainly provides useful guidance. We strongly recommend that when designing markup you avoid creating attributes which contain text that a user will read. Unfortunately, although we made progress on this for XHTML2, we were unable to convince the HTML5 folks to provide better alternatives for alt, title, etc. Which means that examples such as those @johnfoliot provides above are problematic because you can't identify language correctly when (a) it changes within the attribute value, and (b) if the attribute value is in a different language than the element text. (Similar issues for directionality.)