Re: MicroXML design goals

On Tue, Aug 14, 2012 at 8:11 AM, Andrew Welch <andrew.j.welch@gmail.com>wrote:

> > One example of this is consideration of xml:lang.  There is really
> nothing
> > in the current goals that would preclude us from removing support for
> > xml:lang, but I think doing so would be such a bad thing that it' worth
> > capturing the essence in the goals of why that would be such a bad thing.
>
> Why would it be such a bad thing?
>
> Isn't this another thing that's better handled at the application level...
>

I think it's a fair argument that it could be handled at the application
level, but I don't think it could be better handled there.  I think it's
quite useful to have a generic mechanism for language assertion which is
consistent across applications and can be processed independently of
applications.

I will say that the lack of such in JSON has proved a real pain to me in
practice, even though JSON is mechanically more suited to data than
document style. Because of its broad use on the Web very often language
artefacts get processed through JSON, and you end up having to reinvent the
wheel each time of how you internationalize these, usually by complicating
the processing pipeline.


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