RE: Internationalization Requirements

One of the things I've been doing this past week is assessing where WEBDAV
stands today against Xerox needs.  The two areas that stand out as the most
serious shortfalls for Xerox are the lack of support for variants and the
lack of support for compound documents.  Our interest in variants is more in
the area of document formats than language variants, though language is
important, too.

I'll see what I can do about coming up with some concrete suggestions about
for adding these capabilities to WEBDAV.

That having been said, I would not want to do anything that would delay the
publication of a WEBDAV proposed standard.

--Judy

At 03:59 PM 8/6/97 PDT, Jim Whitehead wrote:
>Dylan,
>
>My sense of the working group is that most members do not want to address 
>the issue of providing authoring support for language variants in the first 
>rev. of the WebDAV specification.  I have received this impression at both 
>the Palo Alto meeting, and also at the Orem working group meeting.  Given 
>this, if you wish to prosecute your position on language variant authoring 
>support, I recommend that you produce some concrete recommendations for a) 
>requirements, and b) protocol support required to implement this 
>capability.  The best avenue for publishing such a recommendation would be 
>an Internet Draft.  I can point you at instructions for creating I-Ds if 
>you are unfamiliar with them.
>
>Without such a concrete recommendation, it will be difficult for you to 
>convince the working group to support such capability, especially since I 
>believe there currently exists rough consensus *not* to support authoring 
>of language variants.  You are also free to demonstrate to me that language 
>variant authoring support is indeed desired by more than just two (vocal) 
>members of the mailing list, but to date I have seen no such evidence.
>
>- Jim
>
>On Wednesday, August 06, 1997 12:52 AM, Dylan Barrell 
>[SMTP:dbarrell@bb.opentext.com] wrote:
>> I disagree with the statement that we do the world a disservice by 
>implementing a solution for language variants only. I think that this would 
>be doing those authors out there (most large coporations web authors) who 
>have to develop and maintain multilingual web sites a great service.
>>
>> Cheers
>> Dylan
>>
>> ----------
>> From: 	Yaron Goland[SMTP:yarong@microsoft.com]
>> Sent: 	Montag, 4. August 1997 14:40
>> To: 	'Dylan Barrell'; 'Roy T. Fielding'; Martin J. Duerst
>> Cc: 	w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>> Subject: 	RE: Internationalization Requirements
>>
>> It is not enough to say "Here are the different languages this document
>> is available in." You must also tie that into all the other axis's of
>> variation including CPU needed to execute, software required to read,
>> format, encoding, etc. We do the world a disservice if we try to solve
>> language variation independently of general variation.
>>
>> In addition, given the complexity of the issues and the varying
>> requirements from supporting variation on a single axis to supporting
>> variation on multiple independent axis's, I do not believe we are ready
>> to come out with a coherent standard.
>>
>> Variation is something the net does not do particular well. I think the
>> HTTP standard's attempts to deal with the problem have demonstrated
>> that. I can only speak from my personal experience trying to implement
>> HTTP on IE 4.0, a browser which is internationalized into some large
>> number of languages, but we were forced to cut support for the Vary
>> header and quality numbers from the get go. I think this problem needs
>> to age more, better consensus as to what the key features are need to be
>> developed, and then we can discuss standardization.
>>
>> Standards never lead, they only follow.
>>
>> 		Yaron
>>
>> > -----Original Message-----
>> > From:	Dylan Barrell [SMTP:dbarrell@bb.opentext.com]
>> > Sent:	Monday, August 04, 1997 1:04 AM
>> > To:	'Roy T. Fielding'; Martin J. Duerst; Yaron Goland
>> > Cc:	Dylan Barrell; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>> > Subject:	RE: Internationalization Requirements
>> >
>> > I agree that it would be too difficult to handle variants in general
>> > however language variants are a special case which would be easy to
>> > handle. There is always a one-to-one relationship between any given
>> > resource and its corresponding translation to another given language
>> > and the server is currently required to understand this relationship
>> > in order to handle the accept-language header correctly.
>> >
>> > Cheers
>> > Dylan
>> >
>> > ----------
>> > From: 	Yaron Goland[SMTP:yarong@microsoft.com]
>> > Sent: 	Mittwoch, 30. Juli 1997 21:17
>> > To: 	'Roy T. Fielding'; Martin J. Duerst
>> > Cc: 	Dylan Barrell; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>> > Subject: 	RE: Internationalization Requirements
>> >
>> > Um.. not that I'm aware. We decided very early on to not deal with
>> > variants. It brought up too many ugly issues. In fact, the problem
>> > most
>> > likely would require the introduction of a Turing complete scripting
>> > language. Even TCN is not powerful enough to capture all the possible
>> > issues.
>> >
>> > Either way it was felt that we got a big enough win just solving the
>> > non-variant scenarios that it was worth achieving that goal rather
>> > than
>> > being hopelessly lost in an unending morass of negotiation
>> > specification
>> > issues.
>> >
>> > 			Yaron
>> >
>> > > -----Original Message-----
>> > > From:	Roy T. Fielding [SMTP:fielding@kiwi.ics.uci.edu]
>> > > Sent:	Saturday, July 26, 1997 9:21 PM
>> > > To:	Martin J. Duerst
>> > > Cc:	Dylan Barrell; w3c-dist-auth@w3.org
>> > > Subject:	Re: Internationalization Requirements
>> > >
>> > > >> Correct me if I'm wrong and show me where I can read about it,
>> > > >> but the server *doesn't* give you the variants list and certainly
>> > > >> doesn't map them to the language and this is exactly what I'm
>> > > >> complaining about.
>> > > >
>> > > >You may be right. I had a look at the HTTP 1.1 spec, and I only
>> > > >found 10.4.7  406 Not Acceptable. The behaviour described there
>> > > >is not very deterministic. Maybe Roy can help out?
>> > >
>> > > That is why we have a WebDAV working group.  Both the 300 and 406
>> > > response bodies were left unspecified because the intention was that
>> > > they be specified by a group that actually had time to study the
>> > > problem in detail and come up with a [hopefully] better solution
>> > > than some off-the-cuff invention of mine.  It was one of the WebDAV
>> > > to-do items, last time I checked.
>> > >
>> > > ....Roy
>> >
>> >
>>
>> 
>
>
>
Name:			Judith A. Slein
E-Mail:			slein@wrc.xerox.com
Internal Phone:  	8*222-5169
External Phone:		(716) 422-5169
Fax:			(716) 265-7133
MailStop:		105-50C

Received on Thursday, 7 August 1997 09:44:59 UTC