Re: New Working Group Note: Best Practices for XML Internationalization

On Feb 15, 2008, at 11:50 AM, Tex Texin wrote:

> I should be able to extract a string from a database and have it  
> work equally well regardless of the context.

The issue of extracting a string from a database and embedding it into  
a document seems to me to be a particularly knotty one.  How do you  
form the strings in your database so that they will display well if  
you do not know in advance whether the context in which they will be  
embedded will be LTR or RTL?  On the other side, how do you embed  
strings in your document if you do not know in advance what sort of  
bidi content they will have?  A mismatched bidi formatting code in an  
embedded string, for example, could cause problems.

Douglas Davidson