[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Internationalization and naming
While writing a blip about XML's support for multiple languages (Unicode, xml:lang, etc.), it occurred to me that XML still has a ways to go toward removing the language barriers with regard to element and attribute names. HTML imposed an element vocabulary roughly based on English upon document authors the world over, and not everyone was especially thrilled about it. XML avoids this issue - you can name your elements and attributes whatever you like - but it seems likely to crop up again any time people and organizations go to build document standards using XML. Will English vocabularies be used, or will other languages be used? In the current XML 1.0 spec, validation requires exact matching of tag names, and as far as I can tell, there isn't any discussion of validating a transformed document (via XSL or whatever) that converts documents using French or Chinese element/attribute names to English (or whatever the standard uses.) This seems like something that the next generation of schemas could address neatly, by providing room for something like a translation table, identifying elements and their 'standard' equivalents. This could open up validation considerably, and possibly make it a lot easier to get buy-in from user communities that perhaps have no input toward the standards or their choice of language. These translations could, of course, take place elsewhere in the process (editing tools, XSL, etc.), but it seems like addressing it where it matters - the validation process - is a cleaner solution, at least to me. (A clearer model for transformation and validation might help as well, if this proposal is too radical.) Simon St.Laurent XML: A Primer / Cookies Sharing Bandwidth Building XML Applications (February) http://www.simonstl.com 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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