[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: ATTN: Please comment on XHTML (before it's too late)
Paul Prescod writes: > Tim Bray wrote: > > > > HTML4 has 3 DTDs. That certainly doesn't mean it's 3 languages. > > What definition of language are you using? Once people said that a language is just a dialect with an army and a navy, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries the United States went to all the trouble of building their own army and navy and still didn't end up with their own language. What that really means is that people tend to use the language name to make the most important, not the least important distinctions. I call what people in much of Canada, the U.S., England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of India and South Africa speak as their mother tongue "English" despite the enormous differences among them (and among different regions and among different socio-economic groups within each region). Most of the time, that's the most important distinction to me: I want to know if someone is speaking (or writing) English or German, not Central-Canadian-young-university-educated-suburban-English or Eastern-US-rural-working-class-Tidewater-English or whatever. Still, the differences are significant: there are differences in vocabulary (CA "chocolate bar" = US "candy bar", UK "boot" = US "trunk", etc.), differences in grammar (morphological differences like "y'all" vs "youse" and many syntactic differences), and differences in pronunciation. If I need to draw attention to these differences, I do so with a secondary qualifier ("Scottish English", etc.), but most of the time I don't need to make that distinction so I don't bother with the qualifier. This all matters, because naming HTML elements is really the same thing -- the name should identify the most obvious information, not the least obvious. I agree with Paul that we need a method for discovering the version of HTML names (or any names) being used, but I have not heard any good argument about why we cannot just use an html:version attribute -- that way, what Eliot calls "cheap processors" will still work more-or-less OK, while fancy processors can check the version and do the right thing. The alternative -- inventing a whole machinery of Namespace URI equivalence mappings -- seems a little heavy-handed for such a simple problem. > Until recently our only name for languages *was* the DTD's public or > system identifier. Therefore it has been routine for similar languages > to have differing names: > > PUBLIC "-//TEI//DTD TEI Lite 1.5 //EN" "pubtext/teilite.dtd" > PUBLIC "-//TEI//DTD TEI Lite 1.6//EN" "pubtext/teilite.dtd" > > PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0//EN" strict.dtd > PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" pubtext\html\html4.dtd > PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Frameset//EN" frameset.dtd > > PUBLIC "ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN" > PUBLIC "ISO 8879-1986//ENTITIES Added Latin 1//EN//HTML" Wrong -- those are the names of the schemas, not the names of the languages. TEI and HTML have long had human-readable names that most people use most of the time: Namespaces is just an attempt to help machines to disambiguate them. All the best, David -- David Megginson david@m... http://www.megginson.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/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 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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