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Re: Warnings, RFC 1522, and ISO-8859-1

From: Per Starback <starback@minsk.docs.uu.se>
Date: Thu, 19 Dec 96 20:24:18 +0100
Message-Id: <9612191924.AA02237@Minsk.DoCS.UU.SE>
To: mogul@pa.dec.com
Cc: http-wg%cuckoo.hpl.hp.com@hplb.hpl.hp.com
X-Mailing-List: <http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com> archive/latest/2120
Jeffrey Mogul wrote:
> Again, I know very little about i18n; is it actually the case that you
> cannot always render the text with knowledge of the character set
> alone, but must also know the language as well?

(I also know very little about i18n.  These are free thoughts from me.)
I don't think you *must* know it, but it can help.  I think it would
be beneficial if all texts are marked with natural language.  Here are
some ways a program might use the information on what language a text
is in:

 * Hyphenate correctly
 * Transliterate the text into another character set before showing
it.  How to transliterate might depend on what language the text is in.
 * Deciding which dictionary to use if the user can look up words in
the text in a dictionary from the rendering program.
 * Do an automatic translation into another language.  (A bit far-fetched...)

Specific for warning messages like those:
 * Decide if the warning text sent should be shown, or a stock
message associated with that error number instead.

-- 
Per Starback  <starback@minsk.docs.uu.se>  http://www.update.uu.se/~starback
 "Life is but a gamble!  Let flipism chart your ramble!"
Received on Thursday, 19 December 1996 11:27:44 UTC

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