[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
Look, I'm Bulgarian. I use the Cyrillic charset and don't see who would stop me to use cyrillic tag-names ? I cannot understand why there must be so English-specific restrictions, after all English is not the only spoken language. I think that others non-English speakers will agree. In the past, languages like C/C++, Pascal, COBOL, etc. where written by English speakers, and of course they were using English keywords. This is fine, but this *was* in the past. After that many attempts for internationalization were made - in OSes, applications, even BIOS programs. The world is heading towards the idea "every program/document/tool/OS must be available in every possible spoken language". We are too far from that though, but we couldn't possibly get there by statements like "...ah well - we are speaking English, so lets just assume everyone else does". Please, do not be so near-sighted. Internationalization is the future. Unicode is a good begining. There aren't many tools that support it ? No problem, they will be made. OSes will develop support for it. It's just a matter of time. So please, do not assume English is the only language for element-names, attributes, etc. Because it isn't. Regards, Dimiter -----Original Message----- From: XML Everywhere [mailto:host@x...] Sent: Friday, July 13, 2001 10:31 AM To: xml-dev@l... Subject: Re: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers 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. 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. Those are good reasons to be cautious. But character encoding issues apply equally well to the whole document, not just to names. As of yet, nobody has made a good argument as to why XML names are so restrictive. Who hasn't been surprised and a little miffed that values for "ID" attributes can't start with a number? It's fine to reserve some characters for future use (such as punctuation), but an element name is not like a C++ variable name. At least there is no good reason why they should be restricted as such. It's just what the gods decided at the time, probably because they are, of course, programmers. So gods, explain yourselves. Or, being gods, you have the luxury of not having to answer to anyone. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...> To: <xml-dev@l...> Sent: Thursday, July 12, 2001 10:29 PM Subject: RE: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers Immediate advantages of native tag names cannot be denied, but at what cost? Yes, little XSLT or Perl can translate, but cost of realizing 'can' is not zero. A Korean bank, which decided two years ago to use native tag names companywide, now has to merge with an American bank, some heads will roll when the CEO is faced with the bill. My point is that we donot understands the issues fully, and we need to find out before such practice becomes unreversably common. ------------------------------------------------------------------ The xml-dev list is sponsored by XML.org, an initiative of OASIS <http://www.oasis-open.org> The list archives are at http://lists.xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ To unsubscribe from this elist send a message with the single word "unsubscribe" in the body to: xml-dev-request@l...
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