strike the DASL language tag

I formally withdraw my proposal for a "language" tag in the sortby tag.

I had proposed this tag for the sort operators (and stated that the
comparison operator also needed it), on the grounds that comparison of
natural language strings depends on knowing the language in which the
strings are expressed.  The grounds are true, but I now think the
conclusion is false.  We don't need to pass the language tag in the
comparison operator, because we already know (or should know) the
language of the property string from the PROPPATCH that put it there,
because XML has the xml:lang tag.  So when the data was first stored,
the client told the server the language.

Since we're explicitly *not* chartered to do cross-language
comparisons, the data will be compared using the semantics of the
language it was stored in, and the DASL client does not get a chance
to ask for a different sorting.

Perhaps we should state a rule for the case where one property has an
explicit language tag and the other does not.  And we should certainly
define the behavior for the case where the languages differ (perhaps
it should be left to the server to choose.)

Received on Thursday, 25 June 1998 21:55:25 UTC