Language attributes

I understand the point of the language retention in the new draft. I 
haven't implemented it yet, but I don't expect it to be too hard. I'm 
not sure how useful this will be in practice, but it doesn't feel 
like it will hurt too much.

I do wonder, however, why you felt it necessary to add a new Infoset 
property here? Unlike the included sets property, this is not 
directly related to the functionality of XInclude. It is something 
that could have been added to the original Infoset spec, and wasn't. 
Sneaking it in here doesn't feel right.  There are a few of other 
issues with this:

1. As far as I know no API or tool provides specific support for 
this. i.e. there's no getLanguage call in DOM, or XOM, or XSLT. 
Everyone just reads the xml:lang attributes if they need to know this.

2. Adding language as an infoset property in addition to the xml:lang 
attribute opens up the possibility that these could get out of sync. 
That's a big enough problem in the Infoset already without adding to 
it here.

I suggest simply removing all the verbiage about the [language] 
property and simply defining this in terms of an xml:lang attribute 
information item. I don't think this would have any practical affect 
on implementations, but it would make the spec smaller, simpler, and 
cleaner.
-- 

   Elliotte Rusty Harold
   elharo@metalab.unc.edu
   Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003)
   http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml
   http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaulaitA

Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 10:18:55 UTC