Re: Question on implementation of the language property

At 02:17 2002 07 24 +0400, Nikolai Grigoriev wrote:
>Paul Grosso had written:
>> We would like to hear what the various XSL-FO implementations 
>> accept for values of the language property, specifically, 
>> whether 2 character language codes are accepted or rejected.
>
>In RenderX XEP, there is no control on the syntax of language property.
>The property value is taken as a key to select a correspondent 
>hyphenation table in a configuration file. If a user decides to define 
>a hyphenation table for Klingon or Elvish, it's up to him to choose 
>a proper language tag for it. Needless to say, two-byte codes are accepted.

Stepping down as "designated speaker" of the XSL FO subgroup
and speaking instead as an XSL FO implementor, I'd like to
say that Arbortext's Epic Editor XSL FO support works much like 
that of RenderX's XEP as described by Nikolai.  The language
property value is used as a key to select hyphenation (and
spelling) tables/dictionaries.  We allow two letter codes.

Also speaking as a user, stylesheet writer, and implementor,
I would find it very surprising if something as common as
language="en" or language="fr" in my stylesheet caused an
error.  Many of my customers don't even know the 3 letter
language code for english or french or german or whatever.
Especially since 2 letter codes are allowed for xml:lang,
I think XSL should allow 2 letter codes as valid values of 
the language property.

paul

Received on Wednesday, 24 July 2002 12:32:24 UTC