Identifying Language/Locale

This is a draft requirement of "Identifying Language/Locale." I posted this
in ML since I could not find a way to add a new item in WIKI. It might be
better to post a new requirement in ML and do brainstorm first, but if this
needs to be posted in WiKi from the beginning, please let me know. 

 

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Identifying Language/Locale

 

Description:

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.      


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.  

NOTE;

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.