RE: XForms & internationalisation

This issue brings to mind something to be considered for the UI side of
XForms. Its related to Internationalization but it casts its net a little
wider. Its also not strictly a UI issue.

If I have a enumeration (lets say Country) then clearly I want to be able to
provide alternate ways to express that. EX (I've left out some important
parts, only to highlight my point...  assume that all the correct stuff is
in there):

<VALUE ID='t1'>
	<EXPRESSION lang='en'>United States</EXPRESSION>
	<EXPRESSION lang='fr'>Estas Unis</EXPRESSION> <!-- je m'escuse. my
french is a lot rusty -->
</VALUE>
<VALUE ID='t2'>
...
</VALUE>

and so on. I used expression becuase I honestly couldn't think of any other
word to use

I expect that something like this will appear on the UI side of things.
However, this only handles the one situation where I have text from
different countries. What is likely to happen is that as the person
providing the UI, I may have more than just text to offer. This could be
handled something like:

<VALUE ID='t1'>
	<EXPRESSION mimetype='text/text' lang='en'>United
States</EXPRESSION>
	<EXPRESSION mimetype='text/text' lang='fr'>Estas Unis</EXPRESSION>
<!-- je m'escuse. my french is still a lot rusty -->
	<EXPRESSION mimetype='image/jpg' href='us.jpg' lang='en' />
	<EXPRESSION mimetype='image/jpg' href='etas.jpg' lang='fr' />
<VALUE ID='t2'>
...
</VALUE>


The idea would be to provide a way to express the meaning of some value in a
way other than text. Practical examples of this would be to provide audio
versions for the blind, perhaps a Braille optimized file. Images would be
useful for children (who are more likely to recognize their own flag than
they could read their country's name). There are also the other commercial
uses (provide a image of a product in addition to the text). 

This could obviously be extended to the descriptive text that is associated
with a form element.

My two cents worth
Adam van den Hoven

On Tue, 22 Aug 2000, Maurice wrote:

> <value> enumerations and defaults in the XForms model are mixing
> data structure/type with actual displayed data. It makes
> internationalisation more difficult. If a model contains such
> data, then we have to translate it into all languages that we
> want to support. I don't have a problem with <value> and
> <default> if the value is actually a _key_ for a separate locale
> specific resource. We only have to translate the resource and
> leave the model as it is.
> 
> <model>
>    <group name="salutionTitle">
>      <value key="t1"/>
>      <value key="t2"/>
> ...
> </model
> <resource>
>   <string key="t1">Mr</string>
>   <string key="t2">Mrs</string>
>    ...
> </resource>
> <instance>
> ...
> </instance>
> 
> regards
> -Maurice

Received on Friday, 1 September 2000 11:31:34 UTC