[XSL-LIST Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: <sort lang="sv"/> in Saxon
Hi Jeni, thanks for the explanations! If your book is full of this kind of stuff, and no doubt it is, it's a *must have*! However, maybe i'm feeling overly nitpicky today... > The XSLT Rec specifically states: > lang specifies the language of the sort keys; it has the same range > of values as xml:lang [XML]; if no lang value is specified, the > language should be determined from the system environment > So the local collating sequence should be used if no lang attribute is > specified. Actually, it is not explicitely mentioned that the language determines the collating sequence. Furthermore, the concept of "local collating sequence" is, without a reference to a defining standard, ill defined. After all, what's "local": The machine default setting, if such a thing even exists, a user dependent environment, an environment setup specifically for a certain transformation run? I'd rather like to have the wording "The processor should document how it obtains a language in absence of an explicit specified value." or something like that. At least it's not as fuzzy as "get it from the environment". > The fact is that sorting according to different languages isn't > straight-forward. Oh well! Just another note: practically every reasonable built up environment knows how to sort according to the POSIX LANG=C locale. But there is no standardized way to tell a processor to use it (unless i missed the IANA code for it). Except by default, of course. Hmm. > ... it's a > massive burden to expect every processor to support *every* language. Yes, it's a pity that despite all the work already done most environments are still lacking many important capabilities. > > ...rationale for inventing the xsl:lang attribute > *Probably* it's to do with the fact that xml:lang is designed to > indicate the language used by the element content/attribute values on > an element. xsl:sort doesn't have any content; Great explanation, i thought "if there is no content, why does the distinction matter?" but i missed the attributes! > if you used xml:lang it would be to do things like: [heretic example snipped] Is there a way to unwrite this? Or at least to embargo it for french users :-), for fear someone thinks it's actually a good idea to have keywords to be localized (see the extensive but totally pointless discussion in XSchema whether for example floating point numbers should be accepted in their localized form). > (xsl:)lang, on the other hand, is indicating the language of the sort > values, which is a uniquely XSLT concept. Agreed. But then, as we are already running a big schema impact discussion, how does this kind of language specification relate to schema specified datatypes? Regards J.Pietschmann XSL-List info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/xsl/xsl-list
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