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Re: Xml internationalization design

• To: xml-dev@l...
• Subject: Re: Xml internationalization design
• From: "Rick Jelliffe" <rjelliffe@a...>
• Date: Tue, 9 May 2006 01:22:37 +1000 (EST)
• Importance: Normal
• In-reply-to: <BAY118-F33551D7773F64C96E22B14DCA80@p...>
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tom tom said:
> I'm currently designing the XML to be used within an multi language
> application.
>
> I would like to know if there is any official recommendation about how to
> nest an element that offers multi-language values.

I don't know of any official recommendations on this. The European
Parliament and many organizations will undoubtedly have methods adopted,
but these are not "official" in the sense of some standard.

One approach is to have your cake and eat it. Have a content model like

  etc, (maintitle+ | maintitles), etc

where
  <!ELEMENT maintitles (maintitle+) >

You don't use that name "maintitle" anywhere else. Your stylesheets can be
written to accept both forms, probably just providing the template
matching "maintitle"; so there may be no extra work involved in
programming.

People very often write schemas and DTDs that overconstrain things.
Grammar based schemas are not very good at expressing "this thing appears
in this area of the document, though the particular context is not
important", which trains us to think too narrowly.

The constraints in your document schema should mirror your business
requirements, and you should avoid constraints that cannot be traced to
business requirements. They just represent inflexibility, unagility and
future (and present, sometimes!) cost. If there is no business requirement
to force titles either to be an uncontained list or a contained list, then
allowing both forms may be the prudent option.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

• References:
  • Xml internationalization design
    • From: "tom tom" <tomxsllist@h...>

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