Re: Internationalized CLASS attributes

At 20:22 16/10/96 +0100, Bert Bos wrote:

>The next version of HTML will have a CLASS attribute on (nearly) all
>elements, as described in several documents ([1], [2], [3], [4]). The
>intention is to allow authors to attach semantic information to
>element
...

>So it appears that case-conversions are language dependent. That's
>why, for example, there is setlocale() in POSIX. But is it practical
>to make the case rules for CLASS dependent on the language? Where
>would you get the language from?
>
>Or do we change the interpretation of CLASS, and say that it is just a
>code (class=xyz12, class=p-89x), that doesn't have to be
>human-readable? In that case ASCII is all we need.
>
>What do people think?

There is another side to this problem as well. Suppose I put 
class=name as an attribute and a Frenchman puts class=nom.
Sematically these are the same, but there is no way that case conversion
will help to determine this.

What we really need is something, like the RFCs relating to REV and REL,
which suggest a set of useful class names that could be applied by anyone,
irrespective of their country of origin. Admittedly most people would not
then be able to use their native language to name such transportable
classes, but the up-side would be that they would be able to identify
information of the class they require without having to search for all the
possible names for the class.

Martin Bryan
----
Martin Bryan, The SGML Centre, Churchdown, Glos. GL3 2PU, UK 
Phone/Fax: +44 1452 714029   WWW home page: http://www.u-net.com/~sgml/

Received on Thursday, 17 October 1996 05:00:30 UTC