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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] i18n (was Re: Open Standards Processes)
 From: Gregg Reynolds <greyno@m...> >If I've misunderstood something I hope somebody will correct me, but if >I'm not mistaken pretty much everybody involved is from the the >"developed" world, mostly the West. Because to participate means there must be the leisure or finance to do so, and there must be the technological background to do so, and there must be the techno-cultural self-awareness to do so. All these are attributes of the center (or North, or West, whatever you call it.) I asked several Thais when line breaks could occur, for example. The best answer I got was "when it is beautiful". (Actually, in the particular case of Thai and the Indic script languages, I would imagine there will be a great increase in knowledge because of James Clark's interest in the region. Exploration is always done by outsiders.) > The W3C has no doubt made excellent good-faith >efforts to internationalize the standard; but is there any input from, >say, an Indian librarian? An Egyptian computer scientist? An Ugandan >Web-site operator? Has the W3C made an effort to seek out qualified >professionals from "the South"? I don't see how it's possible for a >truly "world"-wide-web to happen without such input. I introduced W3C's Bert Bos to my current boss, a Jordanian with Arabic i18n (internationalization) experience, at the WWW7 conference. Bos said that there was currently no input from Arabic people: no-one (or perhaps none with sufficient credentials) had come forward. The driving force behind W3C i18n, as was clear at the developer's day session, is the need to support the needs of advertisers better. The Web is not a library, it is a TV network posing as a library. So i18n efforts through W3C will be prioritized by market value: Europe, then CJK, then anything else that is easy. If you are concerned about this, the best approach is to ask them exactly what they need: I have found an enormous goodwill to the idea of throrough-going i18n at W3C. Their problem is that they cannot devote resources to finding out what is needed. So make up a nice couple of pages of solutions to real problems that you see, and send it off to Martin Duerst, Jon Bosak and Bert Bos. I am sure they would be delighted for all input: they are gathering information for CSS3 and XSL. When I started looking at "native language markup" it is interesting that the only opposition I got, outside Americans, was from Indians. I think that was because all educated Indians speak English, so if someone uses a computer they are not held back by English markup. Also, markup in a foreign language is very visually distinct. But I cannot agree with them: enumerations in attributes are really a kind of data: so even if an Indian DTD can get away with English element type names, other kinds of names will need an extended range of characters available. > I understand it's no easy matter >to rewrite gcc to support c programs written entirely in Urdu, but XML >(and XSL and etc) is another matter. It's entirely reasonable (IMO) to >write the spec in a way that supports multiple writing systems. SGML made it an explicit goal "there should be no national language dependencies". XML has improved on this, adopting ISO 10646 Universal Character Set (Unicode) and predefining xml:lang for every element type. (I wish they had also predefined xml:script too, but users can do that if they need it.) SGML seems to have spearheaded an awareness of this at ISO. The new guidelines for programming languages mandate language neutrality, and some way of encoding ISO 10646 characters into 8 bit strings are being retrofitted onto most standards. Making UTF-8 the encoding used in 8-bit strings seems the least cost method, if your software is 8-bit clean. Rick Jelliffe <PLUG>PS Since you are particularly interested in Arabic, you may be interested that in my book "The XML and SGML Cookbook", which comes out next month, there is an index in which you can look up the XML numeric character codes for all the arabic characters available in XML, and also a CD-ROM which has some arabic entity sets.</PLUG> xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...) 
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