Re: [Serial] additional last call comment about xml:lang

Martin,

     In [1], you submitted the following comment on the Last Call Working 
Draft of XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization on behalf of the I18N 
Working Group:

<<
This is a last call comment on your Serialization document.
We are sorry that this last call comment is late, but it is
very important.

We have earlier sent comments on the Data Model and on XSLT
where we have urged better support for the inheritance of
xml:lang (or for inherited attributes in general). Without
any such support, it is extremely tedious to write a
transformation or query that adequately copies xml:lang
from the input to the output.

In internal discussion, Liam Quin suggested that
it might be more appropriate to submit our comment against
Serialization. The reason for this is that XPath/XSLT offers
reasonable support for extracting xml:lang information from
source documents into the data model. However, when serialized,
this leads in most cases to a completely unnecessary and
undesirable multiplication of xml:lang attributes on
virtually every element. Adding some support for reducing
unnecessary xml:lang attributes from the output on
serialization would be highly desirable. As I think we
have written previously, better support for xml:lang
(and maybe inherited attributes in general) was something
that was left over as 'future work' from XSLT 1.0. Your
current work is the best chance to fix this problem.
>>

     There was much subsequent discussion of the topic between Michael Kay 
and yourself.[2-9]  In [10], you indicated that the I18N Working group was 
satisfied with the mechanisms that are available for filtering redundant 
xml:lang attributes.  The XSL and XQuery Working Groups discussed the 
issue and decided that, in light of the discussion, no change to 
Serialization is required.

     The XSL WG will consider adding an example to the XSLT 2.0 
specification.

     May I ask you to confirm that this response is acceptable to the I18N 
Working Group?

Thanks,

Henry [On behalf of the XSL and XML Query Working Groups]
[1] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0006.html
[2] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0010.html
[3] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0013.html
[4] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0014.html
[5] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0055.html
[6] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0056.html
[7] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0067.html
[8] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0068.html
[9] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004May/0074.html
[10] 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-qt-comments/2004Jul/0052.html
------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Zongaro      Xalan development
IBM SWS Toronto Lab   T/L 969-6044;  Phone +1 905 413-6044
mailto:zongaro@ca.ibm.com

Received on Tuesday, 21 September 2004 19:05:41 UTC