Declaration: a claim made in markup rather than in prose
A declaration is a claim a page makes in its markup, addressed to software rather than to a reader. It can be counted identically by anybody, it can be wrong without anyone noticing, and it is the only language claim on a vendor site with both properties. As of 2026-09-22.
| Property | Prose claim | Markup declaration |
|---|---|---|
| Counted the same way by two readers | Rarely | Yes |
| Written for a human | Yes | No |
| Maintained because it pays | Sometimes | Usually |
| Can be wrong and go unnoticed | Less easily | Yes, indefinitely |
Inclusion rule. The two kinds of language claim a vendor site makes, compared as evidence rather than as marketing. Order. Fixed order, comparability first.
1Written for machines, and therefore uniform
Prose comes in every shape: a heading, a feature list, a sentence in a support article, a number on a pricing page. A declaration comes in one shape, in one place, with one syntax.
That uniformity is the whole reason a register can count it. Two people applying the same written rule to the same page get the same number, which is not true of any prose claim on the same site.
2It can be wrong for years
Nobody reads markup. A declaration pointing at a page that has been retired stays there until somebody audits the site, and a code naming the wrong language looks identical to a correct one from the outside.
One case of the second kind appears in this register: a code belonging to one language pointing at a page in another. It is recorded as a mismatch rather than silently corrected, because correcting it would hide what a declaration actually is.
3What a declaration is evidence of
That somebody spent money translating a page and wanted search engines to route readers to it. That is a commercial signal about where a company expects buyers, and it is more candid than a feature page.
It is not evidence about the product. Everything the product generates sits behind other claims, in prose, on other pages, and those are the claims this register has to read one at a time rather than count.
A definition, not a measurement: no vendor figure appears here that is not also in the register. The mismatched code is recorded on the entry for the vendor that declares it.
Nearby terms: Reading date, Same-host rule. The whole vocabulary is at terms; nothing on this page is a claim about a named product.