Andreas Prilop said:
No. Write <html lang="sv"> ... <p lang="it"> ... <p lang="en"> ...
Or some other combination. The page seems to have equal amounts of text
in each language, so you could pick up any of them for <html
lang="..."> and declare the others as indicated above.
In a sense, <html lang="..."> is illogical, since you will anyway use
lang attributes for all major parts of the document, and
each of the languages is present in a rather balanced way. Technically
WAI guidelines say that it's a no-no not to declare the overall
language (despite the fact that W3C pages themselves often do that, for
much worse reasons). Maybe the theoretically most correct method would
be <html lang="mul">, indicating the presence of multiple languages.
But it shouldn't really matter, as long as each piece of the document
has its language correctly declared.
This is all rather theoretical. Support to lang attributes is rather
minimal (and popular browsers use them _wrong_ if at all), though for a
small amount of users, they will create a pleasant experience when the
speech browser is able to apply the rules of each language and read the
document meaningfully. But IBM Home Page Reader is the only software
that I know that can do such a thing. Oh, and if you open the document
in MS Word, for proofreading, it will recognize those attributes and
apply the spelling rules of each language, if you have a good enough
version and installation of MS Word.
On the practical side, I strongly recommend against _pages_ with
multiple languages (as opposite to _sites_ with pages in different
languages), unless the content of the page itself is essentially
bilingual or multilingual (such as a dictionary or parallel texts for
various studies).
The reason is simple. For any language pair A and B, the amount of
people who know A and B well enough to feel at home on a bilingual page
is much smaller than the amount of people who know A _or_ B well.
Besides, if I know both languages well, why would I need the text in
both of them? (There _can_ be cases, like poor instructions that need
by checked by comparing them against other language versions. But they
can be left to users, simply by giving them links to the other
versions.)
The mere existence of foreign-language texts on a page is alienating to
many people. For the vast majority of mankind, at least three of the
four chunks on a four-language page are effectively just a mess. You do
need a language selection page (since language negotiation cannot yet
be relied upon), but it should be a _very_ simple page. Hardly more
than one short sentence in each language - maybe just the page title in
the language, together with _an_ image on the page for illustrating
what it is about.
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