(I don't know whether this is about a bug or about a feature request, so apologies if this post is in the wrong place.)

# Rationale:

It seems to me that the way ikiwiki handles language information at
the moment isn't optimal.

For instance, if I want to apply different CSS properties depending on
the language, I can't. (This matters for some typographic rules that
differ depending on the language.)

Also, without proper language declarations, the browser cannot hyphen
words correctly, resulting in poor line breaking/wrapping.


# The problem:

## How it's done now:

Right now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I need to write

    bracket bracket !meta language="en"]]

somewhere inside a post in order to tell ikiwiki which language the
post is written in. This will result in the post's HTML as:

    <meta name="language" content="en" />


This isn't sufficient.

## What isn't done

### 1. the blog's lang

There's no way to tell ikiwiki the overall, or main language of the
blog at the moment (again, that's as far as I can see from reading
documentations, forums, etc.)

This setting would be nice, in order to add have something like

    <html lang="en">

on all pages.


### 2. the post's lang

Then, if a specific post has the meta language property explicitly
defined, it should override the language declaration set as default.

### 3. template variable

Right now, there's no

    <TMPL_VAR LANGUAGE>

from what I can tell by testing. As a result, I cannot give specific
css properties or the like.


# Fast way to resolve this

The easiest way to resolve this is to create a TMPL_VAR LANGUAGE so
that at least people who care can use this variable and improve their templates.


----

This really is the most needed feature for me as a writer in both
English and French that I miss the most with ikiwiki. I have looked
around in the source code on <https://github.com/joeyh/ikiwiki> but I
couldn't figure out where this is happening...


I hope you also care :-)

Thanks,
