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Re: Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars

• From: "Anthony B. Coates (XML-Dev)" <abcoatesecure-xmldev@y...>
• To: xml-dev@l...
• Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 00:01:25 +0100

Most specifications like XML Schema, XSLT, etc. are (in my experience)  
essentially volunteer efforts.  Even if people work on these groups as  
part of their job, they are allowed to spend 1 hour per week once they've  
finished the 50 hours of work per week that their 40 hour per week job  
requires.

It's amazing that some of these specifications are finished in a single  
language, let alone in multiple languages.  On top of that, it is unlikely  
that the translations would all be available at the same time, so there  
would be the difficult process of continuously releasing new translations,  
and deciding what level of support deployed applications can or should  
provide for a newly released translation.

However, if you are designing a tool, there is nothing to stop you  
providing your own translation for display/editing purposes, and having  
your tool use that translation.  The XML itself is just the storage  
format, and it shouldn't matter to speakers of French, Bulgarian, or  
Cantonese that the information is stored in XML with English  
element/attribute names, as long as the editor displays the language they  
want to see.  Or, the editor could save the XML in its own translated  
format with the element/attribute names translated to some language other  
than English, as long as it also allowed the XML to be saved with the  
elements/attributes in their default language so that standard tools can  
process the XML.

It's not that the XML formats have to have element/attribute names in  
English, it's just that having them in multiple languages is a lot of  
effort, more effort than most standardisation groups can provide.

Cheers, Tony.

On Fri, 18 Apr 2008 20:17:37 +0100, Ramkumar Menon  
<ramkumar.menon@g...> wrote:

> Gurus,
>
> I had a question. Why is it that languages like XML Schema, XSLT etc  
> allow
> only English in the element and attribute names ?  I am not referring to  
> the
> content, but the actual elements and attributes defined by the grammar.
> i.e.  <schema>, <template>, <call-template>, <for-each>, <element>,
> <attribute> etc....
> Does it make any sense at all to allow these grammars itself to support
> writing schemas/xslts etc in local languages.
>
> Any designer tool can then interpret the text as per the character  
> encoding
> specified in the document declaration and render it according to the
> locale/language preferences.
>
> I know I am missing something very fundamental.
>
> Ram

-- 
Anthony B. Coates
Director and CTO
Londata Ltd
UK: +44 (20) 8816 7700, US: +1 (239) 344 7700
Mobile/Cell: +44 (79) 0543 9026
Data standards participant: genericode, ISO 20022 (ISO 15022 XML),  
UN/CEFACT, MDDL, FpML, UBL.
http://www.londata.com/

• References:
  • Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars
    • From: "Ramkumar Menon" <ramkumar.menon@g...>