Re: xml:lang [was Re: Outstanding Issues ]

At 10:08 02/03/07 -0800, A. Vine wrote:
>And to add to Misha's comment:
>
>There is no tag for locale.  Anywhere.
>
>The reason often stated is that locale is a client concept, not a data 
>concept.
>Of course, in the example below, it is a data concept.

In the example of 1.234,56 appearing in text (e.g. HTML), we as humans
see it as data. But for the computer, it's just part of a string.
Marking it up, e.g. with something like
     <number value='1234.56'>1.234,56</number>
(not available in HTML) will identify it to the computer as data.

This is similar to having "This document was authored by
Ora Lassila" in plain text; RDF doesn't automatically capture it,
it has to be transferred into RDF. Going up the semantic ladder
is difficult and requires work.


>Another reason is that
>locales are not standardized - and this is actually a bigger problem.

This has come up at the recent I18N Workshop
(http://www.w3.org/2002/02/01-i18n-workshop/). If you are interested
in further discussion on what W3C should do in this area, please
subscribe to www-i18n-workshop@w3.org (sending 'subscribe' in the
subject to www-i18n-workshop-request@w3.org).
See also the announcement e.g. at
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2002JanMar/0088.html.


>In order to determine equivalency between 2 different locale-based formats,
>standard internal representations would have to be agreed upon, which are not
>necessarily US format.  In fact, most internal representations of numeric 
>values
>are usually more cryptic than a locale-based format, for efficiency.

The W3C has a collection of standard formats for data exchange, defined
in XML Schema Part 2: Datatypes (http://www.w3.org/TR/xmlschema-2/).
Some of these are close to US formats, but some of them are quite different,
but all of them are textual.


Regards,     Martin.

Received on Thursday, 7 March 2002 23:37:15 UTC