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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Just a Little Explanaton for Veering (RE: Blueberry/Unicode/ XML)
 From: "Don Park" <donpark@d...> > While most of the world is concerned about where the next meal is > going to come from and how to stay upwind of the outhouse, our > self-assigned concerns for the world and eons to come is just so > much fodder for politically-correct-over-design-by-committee > mumbo jumbo. I am probably the only person on this list who has been *employed* by a national institution in non-Latin-using country specifically to work through issues with how to make XML work with their scripts (i.e. Chinese in my case). And I was *employed* in 1993 to look at this issue when I first came up with the ERCS proposals, on which this part of XML is based. And I was *invited* by the CJK Document Processing Group (an ISO liason group mainly of Japanese). And I was *invited* to be an expert with the W3C Internationalization IG. As such, Don's comments about "self-assigned" concerns could not possibly apply to me. Undoubtedly Don includes himself in his approbation and will not say anything more on the subject, being himself "self-assigned." Which would be a great shame, because his views are valuable and often representative of many things. So I beg him not to shut up, no matter how difficult the personal cost, or how firm his resolve, or how deep his dislike of self-appointed people getting together to decide how to reform things based on a couple of over-simplistic principles. On the substance of Don's comment, when markup languages did not support native-language markup, they were never popular in China/Korea/Japan. Now that they do, they are more popular. One of the great reasons is learning: people can learn using examples in familiar words. If we look at books on XML from Japan or China, the ones written in Japan (e.g. Okui-san's books) use kanji element names. The learner can concentrate on the substance without being diverted by English: they will not be confused as to what is a keyword and what is a situation-dependent name. There is an advantage in those examples being real. In the 8 years or more I have been working in this area, I have had only three times I can remember where anyone has said it native language markup is not worthwhile to have. Once was by an army major who said "They can all learn English." Once was by an Indian programmer who said "Everyone who is educated can speak English", which may reflect India's situation. And Don is the third time. In half a dozen visits to Japan, three years in Taiwan, and visits to several other countries in Asia, I have never had anything but encourage and support that this was important, useful, and worth persuing. Where are the calls from third-world countries: "Don't make technology easier for us please"? Cheers Rick Jelliffe (Not speaking for any employer.) 
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