[ESW Wiki] Update of "its0503ReqLangLocale" by MasakiItagaki

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The following page has been changed by MasakiItagaki:
http://esw.w3.org/topic/its0503ReqLangLocale


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  Any document at its beginning should declare a language/locale that is applied to both main content and external content stored separately. While the language/locale may be declared for the whole document as a primary language/locale, when an element or a text span is in a different language/locale from the primary declaration, it should be labeled appropriately. The language/locale declaration should use industry standard approaches.      
  
- '''[CL] I wonder if we should not simply point to [http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag] and the corresponding errata such as [http://www.w3.org/XML/xml-V10-3e-errata]. From my understanding, we should not reinvent the wheel, and I am under the impression that XML Core WG has created sth. normative.'''
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- '''[YS] Not sure if I understand the comment. Do you mean: a) we should not have this requirement because we can simply use xml:lang? Or: b) we should add the reference to xml:lang somewhere in this requirement (in the Notes for example)? I agree if it's b), but would disagree if it's a). I think the requirments should list all issues, even if we have already solutions for them. This way we can make sure we don't forget to mention such existing solutions in our guidelines, and the users will be able to see all i18n/l10n related info in one place.'''
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- '''[CL] It's b)  :-)'''
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- '''[MI]As Christian suggested, I'll include reference information regarding the xml:lang attribute.'''
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  == Background ==
  
  Identifying languages (such as French and Spanish) and locales (such as Canadian French and Ecuadorian Spanish) are very important in rendering and processing document text and content properly since they provide specifications of hyphenation, text wrapping rules, color usage, fonts, spell checking quotation marks and other punctuation, etc. 
  
  In order to simplify parsing process by documentation and localization tools, there should be declaration of a primary language/locale that is applied to the whole document as well as externalized content. This should be done as a document-level property. Meanwhile, as a document may contain content with multiple languages/locales, subsets of the document needs a language/locale attribute. Such a local language/locale specification should be declared against an element or a span.  
  
+ Currently there are several different standards for language/locale specifications, such as RFC 1766 [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt] and RFC3066 [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt]. XML 1.0 prescribes a langauge identification attribute "xml:lang" [http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag]/[http://www.w3.org/XML/xml-V10-3e-errata]. ITS should carefully review these existing industry standards and clearly define what is a language/locale and its purpose in order to successfully meet this requirement.
  
- == Note ==
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- Currently there are several different standards for language/locale specifications, such as RFC 1766 [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1766.txt] and RFC3066 [http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt]. ITS should carefully review existing industry standards and clearly define what is a language/locale and its purpose in order to successfully meet this requirement.
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Received on Thursday, 12 May 2005 04:41:18 UTC