[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Foreign Names
Tim Bray wrote: > > At 06:13 PM 4/14/00 -0700, Don Park wrote: > >Q1: When is it appropriate to use non-English tag names? > >Q2: When is it not? > > For the purposes of this discussion, I take it we regard <P> and <A> as > "English" tag names? :) And I would add a third question: Q3: When is it appropriate to create technology which makes it easier for the rich to penetrate poor countries but makes it more difficult for the poor to take advantage of that technology. I think Q3 is the most fundamental question, because one's answer to it will to a large extent reveal what "appropriate" means. At the moment in Cuba is a gathering of under-developed countries who say that the West (largely the US) is locking them out of technological advantages. (Not to endorse Cuba, but just to say that it is hardly an issue that I am whipping up out of no-where.) And we are currently seeing the patent mechanism being used to lock out the poor and the inarticulate even further. Note Richard Stallman's recent comments on how difficult it is becoming to make free software in such an environment. I am not allowed to bring more than two copies of my book into Taiwan as personal luggage, because the US Government enforces a 301 restriction on copyright against Taiwan: I wrote it yet I am not supposed to bring it in! The US (and the West) already is stacking the decks against the rest of the world, and the rest of the world will get more disaffected by it. Since the legal/political/economic decks are already stacked so heavily, adding or perpetuating more technological prejudice is, to my mind, dangerous for future economic stability. Every extra burdon makes things worse; makes it easier for demagogues to start trade wars. Already in this region we have people selling domain names using East Asian characters, even though such names are not inter-operable with the rest of the Internet. There is a demand for native-language identifiers which cannot be stopped. So to qestions 1) and 2) I would say "who is asking?" If it is a schema writer, I would give one answer (the same answer I have been giving since 1994: the developer of a DTD has a reasonable expectation of the schema's usage and they should try to choose the best names based on their reasonable expectation of the writers and consumers of the documents). On the other hand, if it is someone who might want to build parsers or to promote reduced-XML standards who is asking, I would say "who are we to tell someone what language they should use?" and "please don't set us back 20 years" Surely the purpose of software is to make people's lives easier, not harder. Try this intolerence test: if you see an XML document in a language or script you don't understand, does it irritate you? We should get used to it. Native language markup is one of the most popular features in XML in my region. To remove it just means that people here will become consumers of foreign schemas and not creators of their own. Furthermore, it will make life very difficult for people who want to use XML for data transfer, since element names often are related to the database column and table names: these are often not in English. What if the 80% foregone in an 80/20 tradeoff contains the things needed by the poor, the foreign,the underdeveloped? Open, free, inclusive technologies give the chance to reduce the importance of institutional and political barriers to development. When we create a technological standard we are setting up the technological infrastructure for the next decade: it becomes our responsibility whether we are making a world where technological infrastructure is useable or not. Everytime I comment on this I get some nasty email complaining about moralizing. Anyone whose morality doesn't even advance as far as not harming their neighbour doesn't have credibility. But I don't push this line because of morality or fairness or justice. It is basic self-interest for us Westerners to reduce the chances of trade wars; exclusonary technology merely gives fodder to demogogues. The combination of technological barriers with legal barriers are not one which can only make non-Westerners think that the West will use whatever capabilities it has to get control and keep control of markets. Rick Jelliffe *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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