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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-13T00:02:45+00:00

I have a WordPress template that contains the following element: <html xmlns=http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml <?php language_attributes(‘xhtml’);

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I have a WordPress template that contains the following element:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" <?php language_attributes('xhtml'); ?>>

This returns:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" dir="ltr" lang="en-US" xml:lang="en-US">

Unfortunately the “lang” attribute is invalid XHTML 1.1 – and the client would like this level of validation.

WordPress’ general-template.php file contains the following code:

if ( get_option('html_type') == 'text/html' || $doctype == 'html' )
    $attributes[] = "lang=\"$lang\"";

$doctype is the parameter passed to it (in this case ‘xhtml’). Should get_option be returning a value other than ‘text/html’? If so, what should I be setting in WordPress to achieve this – if anything?

I’ve also tried using preg_replace to take out the “lang” attribute, but this didn’t seem to be able to match the text. If I enter the text manually, it matches! Possibly an encoding issue with the string being returned by language_attributes?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I solved this. There’s a “language_attributes” filter, so I wrote a plugin that hooks into that and does a simple preg_replace. The replace worked when performed here, and it’s a pretty neat way to handle it.

    EDIT

    As requested, here’s the code I used:

    <?php
/*
Plugin Name: Create Valid XHTML 1.1
Plugin URI: http://www.mycompany.com/create_valid_xhtml_1_1
Description: Removes deprecated "lang" attribute from (X)HTML header.
Author: dommer
Version: 1.0.0
Author URI: http://www.mycompany.com
*/

function create_valid_xhtml_1_1($language_attributes) 
{
    return preg_replace('/ lang=\"[a-z]+\-[A-Z]+\"/', '', $language_attributes);
}

add_filter('language_attributes', 'create_valid_xhtml_1_1');
?>
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