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Re: Foreign Names

• From: David Megginson <david@m...>
• To: "XML-DEV (E-mail)" <xml-dev@x...>
• Date: 15 Apr 2000 07:38:19 -0400

"Don Park" <donpark@d...> writes:

> Let see if we can dispell the smell of doom with some technical
> discussion.
> 
> The question is:
> 
> Q1: When is it appropriate to use non-English tag names?

When requirements dictate.

> Second question is:
> 
> Q2: When is it not?

When requirements dictate.

In fact, either Architectural Forms or schema subtyping make it
possible to derive localized versions of vocabularies.  With AFs, it
can look something like this:

  <ville my:form="city">Montréal</ville>
  <Großstadt my:form="city">München</Großstadt>

So, technically, it's feasible.  The cost/benefit analysis will depend
heavily on social and political considerations: for example, I can see
the governments in France or Quebec (or maybe even Wales) wanting to
do this, but probably not those in Germany or Italy.  After all, it's
probably easier just to do the mapping in the authoring tool (where
the element names are visible to the user) rather than in the XML
itself.

As our closest parallel, note that no one has yet (to my knowledge)
produced and deployed a version of HTML with alternative element-type
names.  Perhaps some day a markup language for a really cool app will
come from Korea or Finland, and we'll just have to get used to Korean
or Finnish element type names (if the app was originally designed just 
for local use).


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@m...
           http://www.megginson.com/

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