Re: Future of HTML

Dataweaver (traveler@io.com)
Thu, 26 Mar 1998 11:41:29 -0600 (CST) 

Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 11:41:29 -0600 (CST)
From: Dataweaver <traveler@io.com>
To: Jukka Korpela <jkorpela@cc.hut.fi>
cc: david_richmond@nl.compuware.com, www-html@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.OSF.3.96.980326154304.17555A-100000@beta.hut.fi>
Message-ID: <Pine.BSI.3.96.980326112653.21012B-100000@pentagon.io.com>
Subject: Re: Future of HTML

On Thu, 26 Mar 1998, Jukka Korpela wrote:
> On Thu, 26 Mar 1998 david_richmond@nl.compuware.com wrote:
> >      As for the best way of doing this I am not sure, but adding a 
> >      <DATATYPE> tag would be one way.
> 
> Well, a bit long name. The element for "data type markup" could be
> called just DATA. For example,
>   <DATA TYPE="date">1998-03-26</DATA>

How would this differ from <DIV class="date">?  

> Much more importantly, such markup could be essential in
> _translation_. I once translated some texts on HTML 3.2 using
> BabelFish. I noticed that the translation program was too clever:
> it noticed the 3.2 and converted this number according to the
> conventions of the target language, making it 3,2 for languages
> which use decimal comma! Thus, an author might wish to assist
> translation software to make it realize that 3.2 is a code-like
> notation, not a number with a decimal point in it.

Hmm... valid point.  But as you suggest later, 

> Perhaps a better solution would be an element (nestable with
> other text level markup of course) for simply indicating that
> its content is to remain invariant in translations. This would
> allow us to use, say, the name of an HTML element or a C language
> keyword in running English text so that a translation program had
> a chance of realizing that those names, although found in English
> glossaries, are not to be translated. Someone might says that the
> technically simplest way to achieve this would be to introduce a specifing
> language name (LANG attribute value), such as "none" (with the
> meaning 'no human language'), e.g.
>    The <LANG="none">TITLE</LANG> element...
> but the problem is that the HTML element name TITLE _is_ an English
> word in the sense that it is _pronounced_ as an English word.

This seems to be an issue relating directly to screen appearance, and
would thus probably be better handled by stylesheets.  

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