It seems to be unclear how to get an element's lang through inheritance

[juanlanus]

MDN URL

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/lang

What specific section or headline is this issue about?

Inheritance

What information was incorrect, unhelpful, or incomplete?

... or I didn't understand.

It reads: "If an element has no lang attribute, it will inherit the lang value set on its parent node, which in turn may inherit it from its parent, and so on."
It's not happening, at least the way I expect it to.
Descendants of an element with lang return a null lang property.
I understand that #text nodes have no lang, and this seems to cut the inheritance chain.
So I tried Element.closest('[lang]') and it also failed.

My nodes descend from a fragment, created from a page with lang at its . The fragment didn't come out with the page's lang, so I added it.
The descendants of the fragment don't seem to inherit its lang even after I brute-forced it.

StackOverflow has a number of developers wandering like zombies searching for the light.
I (one of those zombies) finally wrote a function to walk the hierarchy to do what I believed that closest() should do.

This is Chrome version 132.0.6834.83 (Official Build) (64-bit) in Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS

What did you expect to see?

I expected the descendants elements of one having lang set, to proudly return their ancestor's lang.
Or, at least, closest to get it.

Do you have any supporting links, references, or citations?

No response

Do you have anything more you want to share?

Select text and press the button

Cannot upload html & js or 7z files :-(

const getNodeLang = ( node ) => {
  let lang = node.lang;
  while( ! lang && node.parentNode ){
    if( node.parentNode ){
      node = node.parentNode;
    } else {
      return null;
    }
    lang = node.lang;
  }
  return lang;
}

MDN metadata

Page report details

• Folder: en-us/web/html/global_attributes/lang
• MDN URL: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Global_attributes/lang
• GitHub URL: https://github.com/mdn/content/blob/main/files/en-us/web/html/global_attributes/lang/index.md
• Last commit: 816cc4d
• Document last modified: 2024-10-11T12:51:34.000Z

[Josh-Cena]

Descendants inherit the behavior of the lang, such as with assistive technologies or translation softwares. Descendants don't inherit the property. You can't programmatically retrieve this property via HTMLElement#lang, because that property simply reflects the HTML content attribute, as specified. We should mention this on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/lang, as we already do for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/dir.

[juanlanus]

Thanks, JC. In my use case I need to know the language of rach word in a text, including those inside inner tags. I can handle it with what I already did, but wanted to communicate the uncertainty looming. MDN is so good that it surprises me when something is not crystal clear. Thanks for all! Juan

…

On Thu, Jan 16, 2025, 16:16 Joshua Chen ***@***.***> wrote: Descendants inherit the *behavior* of the lang, such as with assistive technologies or translation softwares. Descendants don't inherit the *property*. You can't programmatically retrieve this property via HTMLElement#lang, because that property simply reflects the HTML content attribute, as specified. We should mention this on https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/lang, as we already do for https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/HTMLElement/dir. — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#37680 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AAHIBYOZ3CB6CD3WKIPPJOT2LAASXAVCNFSM6AAAAABVKFICR2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDKOJWGYYDMMRZGQ> . You are receiving this because you authored the thread.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[schenney-chromium]

Note there's a HTML spec issue about this problem, (whatwg/html#7039). The prefixed -webkit-locale CSS property has the lang that the browser will use for that element, only available in Chromium and WebKit based browsers.