I'm a little curious about this too, but I would guess it relates to general cross-language capabilities in any computer language. The same question as applied to, for example, Javascript, doesn't make as much sense - should _fonction_ be recognized as the _function_ keyword in a document with French encoding, or _関数_ in one with Japanese encoding? What about the original keyword when the encoding is different?

I'm certain this conversation has taken place before somewhere. I would, however, be interested to hear what the "official" standardized stance is on the issue.

~ Scott


-----Original Message-----
From: Ramkumar Menon [mailto:ramkumar.menon@xxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Friday, April 18, 2008 2:19 PM
To: xsl-list@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject:  Non-English languages in XSLT, XML Schema grammars

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

-- 
Shift to the left, shift to the right!
Pop up, push down, byte, byte, byte!

-Ramkumar Menon
A typical Macroprocessor