FW: HTML International Coding

Here is a question and answer we could perhaps add to our Q&A list.
Anyone disagree?

I'd need to research the XMetal thing if we included it (and be more
specific, mentioning that it is version 4).  Anyone know of any other
tools that allow this, or know more about what XMetal does?


RI
============
Richard Ishida
W3C

tel: +44 1753 480 292
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/



-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org] 
Sent: 29 April 2003 11:37
To: 'Askin Charles A. J9C683'
Cc: 'Richard Ishida'
Subject: RE: HTML International Coding


Hello,

I just found this languishing in one of my mail folders.  Apologies for
not responding sooner!

The HTML tags are all pre-defined (in English) and must remain that way
to be recognised by user agents (eg. Browsers).

In XML it is possible to define your own tag names.  You can do this in
any language supported by Unicode - though I would caution you to be
careful here.  If you yourself had to deal with a tagset in Chinese or
Hindi, this might prove difficult if you don't speak those languages and
have the right fonts and rendering software on your system.  English tag
names have an advantage in that people from a large number of countries
are likely to be able to view and understand the meaning of the tags.

I also heard very recently that the XML editor XMetal allows you to
temporarily redefine tag names for authors who use other languages - to
help them understand better the semantics - though I've yet to explore
this in more detail.

Hope that helps,

Richard.

============
Richard Ishida
W3C

tel: +44 1753 480 292
http://www.w3.org/International/ http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/



> -----Original Message-----
> From: Askin Charles A. J9C683 [mailto:Charles.Askin@je.jfcom.mil]
> Sent: 25 February 2003 16:12
> To: ishida@w3.org
> Subject: HTML International Coding
> 
> 
> Sir,
> I'm sorry that I will ask this, but my colleagues and I don't
> know the answer to this and I found your name at 
> http://www.w3.org/International/Activity.html#role .
> 
> Question:  When someone writes an HTML document for
> submission on the WWW do they write the tag code (i.e. <html> 
> English) in their native language or do the tags need to be 
> in English.  I realize that the content could be in various 
> languages, but I am curious about within the tags themselves.
> 
> Any reply would be appreciated.
> Thank you,
> Chuck Askin
> charles.askin@saic.com
>

Received on Tuesday, 29 April 2003 06:48:11 UTC