HTML meta tag for content language

Question

What is the difference between the following two HTML meta tags  for specifying spanish web page content    lt meta name  language  content  Spanish  gt    and   lt meta http-equiv  content-language  content  es  gt

User · Answer

You asked for differences  but you can   t quite compare those two   Note that  lt meta http-equiv  content-language  content  es  gt  is obsolete and removed in HTML5  It was used to specify    a document-wide default language     with its http-equiv attribute making it a pragma directive  which simulates an HTTP response header like Content-Language that hasn   t been sent from the server  since it cannot override a real one    Regarding  lt meta name  language  content  Spanish  gt   you hardly find any reliable information  It   s non-standard and was probably invented as a SEO makeshift   However  the HTML5 W3C Recommendation encourages authors to use the lang attribute on html root elements  attribute values must be valid BCP 47 language tags     lt  DOCTYPE html gt   lt html lang  es-ES  gt       lt head gt                Anyway  if you want to specify the content language to instruct search engine robots  you should consider this quote from Google Search Console Help on multilingual sites      Google uses only the visible content of your page to determine its language  We don   t use any code-level language information such as lang attributes

User · Answer

Google recommends to use hreflang  read more info  Examples    lt link rel  alternate  href  http   example com en-ie  hreflang  en-ie    gt   lt link rel  alternate  href  http   example com en-ca  hreflang  en-ca    gt   lt link rel  alternate  href  http   example com en-au  hreflang  en-au    gt   lt link rel  alternate  href  http   example com en  hreflang  en    gt

User · Answer

lt meta name  language  content  Spanish  gt    This isn t defined in any specification  including the HTML5 draft       lt meta http-equiv  content-language  content  es  gt    This is a poor man s version of a real HTTP header and should really be expressed in the headers  For example   Content-language  es Content-type  text html charset UTF-8   It says that the document is intended for Spanish language speakers  it doesn t  however mean the document is written in Spanish  it could  for example  be written in English as part of a language course for Spanish speakers    From the spec      The Content-Language entity-header field describes the natural language s  of the intended audience for the enclosed entity  Note that this might not be equivalent to all the languages used within the entity-body     If you want to state that a document is written in Spanish then use    lt html lang  es  gt

User · Answer

Html5 also recommend to use  lt html lang  es-ES  gt  The small letter lang tag only specifies  language code The large letter specifies  country code  This is really useful for ie Chrome  when the browser is proposing to translate web content ie google translate

User · Answer

As a complement to other answers note that you can also put the lang attribute on various HTML tags inside a page  For example to give a hint to the spellchecker that the input text should be in english   lt input     spellcheck  quot true quot  lang  quot en quot  gt      See  https   developer mozilla org en-US docs Web HTML Global attributes lang

User · Answer

another language meta tag is og locale and you can define og locale meta tag for social media  lt meta property  quot og locale quot  content  quot en quot    gt

[html] HTML meta tag for content language

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