Re: the i18n issue in the WPUB WG [I18N-ACTION-769]

> On 13 Dec 2018, at 20:22, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com <mailto:addison@lab126.com>> wrote:
> 
> Hello Ivan,
>  
> Thank you for your patience. We (I18N WG) discussed this issue in our teleconference today and I’m actioned with this reply. Basically, I’m writing a long response in Issue #354, which you should see shortly.
>  
> How can be best work with your WPUB to resolve this? I don’t think our recommendations have changed. Would a joint meeting help?

I tried to summarize my thoughts in https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/354 <https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/354>. TL;DR: the right way of solving this issue, in my view, is to go to the root, ie, to ensure that a future version of RDF finally takes care of the various i18n issues for literals. Everything else would just follow.

Only a few months ago (e.g., at TPAC) I would have thought this is an utopia. However, a few weeks ago a fierce discussion started, first on the Swig mailing list started by David Booth[1] which quickly led to a thread of discussion of around 450 mails and counting, also spinned off into a  an active Github repository[2], with an explicit goals to participate at the W3C Graph Data Workshop and try to set up a group to define a new version of RDF. The issues around language tags[4], and literals as subjects[5] have been already raised and discussed. This means that here is the chance we were waiting for to get RDF straight in terms of i18n, and we should not hack around on top of an inadequate RDF...

I am of course happy to discuss this anywhere but, frankly, it would require some i18n experts to join the discussion on [2] and, more importantly, at any work that would follow [3].

[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2018Nov/0036.html <https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/semantic-web/2018Nov/0036.html>
[2] https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues <https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues>
[3] https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/cfp.html <https://www.w3.org/Data/events/data-ws-2019/cfp.html>
[4] https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues/22 <https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues/22>
[5] https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues/21 <https://github.com/w3c/EasierRDF/issues/21>



>  
> Addison
>  
> Addison Phillips
> Sr. Principal SDE – I18N (Amazon)
> Chair (W3C I18N WG)
>  
> Internationalization is not a feature.
> It is an architecture.
>  
>  
> From: Ivan Herman [mailto:ivan@w3.org <mailto:ivan@w3.org>] 
> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2018 3:30 AM
> To: Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com <mailto:addison@lab126.com>>; Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org <mailto:ishida@w3.org>>
> Cc: W3C Chairs of Publishing WG <group-publ-wg-chairs@w3.org <mailto:group-publ-wg-chairs@w3.org>>
> Subject: the i18n issue in the WPUB WG
>  
> Addison, Richard,
>  
> this issue is still open:
>  
> https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/354 <https://github.com/w3c/wpub/issues/354>
>  
> As you can see, there are voices against this approach.
>  
> I got informal feedbacks from both of you that the direction in the issue (which is simply the writeup of where we got at TPAC) is not really what you would like, and you also told me that you would pick this up. When can we expect that to happen? I would love to be able to close the issue of directionality for this work, even if we all agree, I think, that it is far from being optimal, but we should be wary of a "perfect is the enemy of the good" effect...
>  
> Thanks
>  
> Ivan
>  
> ----
> Ivan Herman, W3C 
> Publishing@W3C Technical Lead
> Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ <http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/>
> mobile: +31-641044153
> ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704 <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704>

----
Ivan Herman, W3C 
Publishing@W3C Technical Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/ <http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/>
mobile: +31-641044153
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704 <https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0782-2704>