Re: Getting back to the Chinese example

Andrea Vine wrote:

(Andrea - Could you (or your email program) adhere to the convention
to restrict lines to 80 characters (around 70 is even better). Thanks.)

>OK, David's example of a preamble style in English vs. Chinese seems
>to point to a particular view of the CLASS name, that is, it is the
>individual user defining the name.  Not the language, not the locale,
>not the international standards groups.

Well, some people here in the group are thinking about personal users,
but others like to standardize whatever possible.


>Now, recognizing that case-conversion is a problem, I am trying to
>understand the other bones of contention.  In my interpretation,
>I would say the matching should be exact internal encoding, no
>conversions no composition/decomposition.  However the individual 
>user has typed it is exactly what should be matched.
>
>So, that encoding is determined by: 
>
>1)  the way the user's machine is configured (locale, keyboard interpreter, etc.)
>2)  the software the user is using for input, both for the original
>	style name definition and the HTML document(s) using that style name
>
>OK, so this is all well and good for this particular user,

Most probably, if (s)he only uses tools that deal the same way
e.g. with (de)composition.


>but it seems
>like the debate here is focussed on the other folks trying to view this
>document, yes??

Viewing a document is no problem. What we are discussing about is using
document conventions and styles somebody else has created.


>In this case, I think discussion of the translation of FOOBAR
>(in this example) from English to Chinese is irrelevant.  A style
>belongs to a user, not a language nor a country.

It's not irrelevant, but it is a different problem.
One can immagine a Chinese style designer designing a style
for Chinese constitutions, which might differ in structure and
presentation for English ones. On the other hand, one can
immagine that somebody in China wants to make an English
style for constitutions available to Chinese users, and
wants them to use Chinese CLASS names for the classes
in the English style for convenience.

>On the other hand, are we trying to develop standard STYLES for
>each locale/language?  And it would be these standard styles whose
>names would have translations in every language?  I think this is
>asking for more trouble than it's worth.  Better for each HTML
>editor to provide a library of styles.

Exactly. Maybe the problem of equivalents could be solved by some
kind of CLASS equivalence definition? I.e. somebody that wanted
to make available an English style to Chinese users would just
define some equivalences/replacements? I don't know whether
this is possible in SGML, or what SGML mechanism would be most
appropriate, but in C preprocessor syntaxt, it could look
like this:

File constitution.zh.style:

#define preamble Chinese-equivalent-of-preamble
#define amendment Chinese-equivalent-of-amendment

#include constitution.en.style

This is just to show you the idea, of course it would not
work when written exactly like this.

Regards,	Martin.

Received on Monday, 28 October 1996 15:14:20 UTC