(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,