Internationalisation

Maybe I missed it but, even after looking in the mail
archive, I seem to miss some obvious elements in the XForms.

  1. A label or description (in different locales and for
     different sizes)
  2. Help texts (in different locales)
  3. Separation between value and representation. E.g. the
     value tag requires a different value for the actual
     value and the possible representations.

I could understand that the XForms data model is only about
data, but then it will be very hard to generate HTML or WML
automatically (I think) in a user acceptable way. It will
always require complicated tools like XSLT to do a simple
job, worse it will require a domain specific style sheet.

I would like something like this.

    <string name="card" range="closed">
      <label locale="us">Credit card</label>
      <label locale="sv">Kreditkort</label>
      <help locale="us">
        If the list does not show your credit card brand,
        check for the Mastercard or Visa logo
      </help>
      <help locale="sv"
uri="http:/aqute.com/help/sv/creditcard"/>
      <value id="visa">Visa</value>
      <value id="mc">MasterCard</value>
      <value id="diners">Diners</value>
      <value id="ae">American Express</value>
      <value locale="sv|dk" id="hb">Handelsbanken</value>
      <value locale="us" id="hb">Discovery</value>
    </string>

Further, I also support the mails that it is crucial that
the contents of the value tag can come from an external
source because this is so terribly common.

And last, why is the <mask> not an attribute? It is neither
language sensitive nor can it have multiple values?

Overall however, the spec looks very interesting and
extremely useful.

Apologies if this is a stupid question and answered long
ago. (I honestly looked in the mail archive).

Kind regards,

    Peter Kriens

Received on Friday, 25 August 2000 08:12:58 UTC