[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers
Everywhere <host@x...> exclaimed: > English is the lingua franca for business, ergo XML > tags should only contain ASCII. That's a good > guideline if you're writing a DTD for commerce. > But other applications need not heed this advice. International commerce, maybe. Now I just sit here with visions of my former employer (a Fujitsu/IBM/etc. dealer/consultant) trying to run all their financial processing in English, or of trying to get his customers' office minis running all that processing in English. Great Budget Drain! (And the suspicion it would generate from his customers!) The only place we need English markup is at the interface to the international market, and it doesn't take much to translate between Japanese and English markup at the interface -- just a little XSLT, or even Perl, and a translation list of the English and Japanese names. > I do not completely understand Unicode or character > encodings in general. Few people do and fewer > tools support them. Operating systems don't > handle non-ASCII code pages very well. Code pages? Most computer users here are completely oblivious to code pages. Japanese OSses (including MSWindows, Macintosh) are plenty happy to use Kanji in file names. Some Linux releases even use aliases or something similar to provide a lot of the shell commands with Japanese names. Okay, Mac OS X is sort of stuck in between, because they are trying to use UNICODE at the system level without causing problems for file systems using shift-JIS. But you only notice it when you open a terminal window and run a shell. Cheers, Joel Rees programmer -- rees@m... ---------------------------------------------------- To be a tree supporting all information, giving root to the chaos and branches to the trivia, information breathing anew -- This is the aim of Yggdrasill. ============================XML as Best Solution=== Media Fusion Co. ,Ltd. $B3t<02q |
PURCHASE STYLUS STUDIO ONLINE TODAY!Purchasing Stylus Studio from our online shop is Easy, Secure and Value Priced! Download The World's Best XML IDE!Accelerate XML development with our award-winning XML IDE - Download a free trial today! Subscribe in XML format
|