Dear Sirs/Mdms,

I am Erik Thau-Knudsen, web editor of several minor sites (political, professional, private), and a national of Denmark. I am looking much forward to the wonders of XHTML 2.0 once it will be approved. Being a philologist by degree, though, I would like to propose you two more elements — translation and distance — to your Working Draft, specifically to Chapter 9. XHTML Text Module.

Translation
Proposed tag: <trans></trans> or <expl></expl>
When writing philologic papers, it is quite frequent to have a line like: The German numbers from one to three are eins 'one', zwei 'two', drei 'three'. The explanation (translation) is usually written in quotation marks, but practice differs from country to country and even writer to writer. An XHTML Text Element (inline element in CSS terminology) for this would be beneficial, also in order to specify the language used.
In the Working Draft of XHTML 2.0, the tagging, at best, would be :
<p>The German numbers from one to three are <dfn>eins</dfn> <quote>one</quote>, <dfn>two</dfn> <quote>two</quote>, <dfn>drei</drei> <quote>three</quote>.
In my view, it should be:
<p>The German numbers from one to three are <dfn>eins</dfn> <trans>one</trans>, <dfn>two</dfn> <trans>two</trans>, <dfn>drei</drei> <trans>three</trans>.

Outside philological works, translating is also normal in newspaper and magazine articles. When viewing the bulk of texts on the WWW produced per year, it really makes me wonder that a tag for translations has not been introduced, but W3C retains inline elements whose use is restricted to the sphere of computer manuals, such as <code>, <kbd>, <samp>, <var>, and even introduces an element for a line in a printout of a program <l>.

Distance
Proposed tag: <dist></dist>
The element expresses a distancing of the speaker to the uttered. Irony is another aspect of distance. In print, this is often expressed by the use of quotation marks (and in speaking, notably in West Europe, USA, with a gesture of drawing the quotation marks), e.g. :

Anthony "loves" to put on woolen underwear.

yet this is not a quotation, for which HTML 4.0 - XHTML 2.0 (Working Draft) already have the tags <q></q> or <quote></quote>. The whole issue becomes more interesting when distance is expressed in audial user agents, where another pitch value should be used for distance.

Yours sincerely

Erik Thau-Knudsen
cand. mag. & ling. merc.
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