I use Dreamweaver. I have since version 1.0.

I’m a fan.

That said, as you would imagine, I very rarely use the WYSIWYG features. I mostly use the text editor and the site management features (including Subweaver, a handy SVN inetgration.) Occasionally, however, I do open it in WYSIWG mode and very often I’m surprised at how well that editor actually handles things.

Last night I ran into one such surprise.

For my personal blog, I’m in the middle of writing an article about movies. Being a geek, I like to post the original language title whenever possible- basically so that people who speak the original language can be sure that they’re reading about the correct film and English speakers can get a little exposure to foreign tongues.

Anyway, as Yahoo! so usefully pointed out (with audio examples), when using languages other than the document default it’s imperative to use the lang attribute in order to give screen readers a fighting chance at a correct pronunciation.*

Which leads to the surprise. Late last night I was editing the blog article. I sometimes do that in Dreamweaver to take advantage of advanced formatting and a larger editing window while still preserving the document as HTML for easy pasting back into WordPress. Anyway, I pasted the name of a Chinese film into the WYSIWYG window. It was a string of Traditional Chinese characters and as soon as I pasted it, I thought to myself “damn it, what’s the lang value for Traditional Chinese?” I then opened the editor view to manually edit the lang attribute and saw this:

<span xml:lang="zh-hant" lang="zh-hant">無間道</span>

Color me surprised. Not only had it handled the standard lang attribute- it did a belt and suspenders job using the xml:lang attribute as well.

Nice!

This is one of those moments where I start to wonder what else the WYWIWG window does. And then I realize it would rapidly drive me insane and the curiosity dies.

Still, that’s a nice touch.

*Search engines will also pick up on the information, in order to tell what’s a keyword and what’s not and to get proper context to parse out meaning.