Internationalised HTML

HTML was created by an english man working in a European research 
facility, who used things that occurred to him as vaguely mnemonic for 
tags. It was extended by an international process, although since all 
the work was done in english, and at that stage very fast, it is not 
surprising that non-english speakers didn't get much of a look in.

On the other hand, the names of tags isn't very important - they are 
not meant to be read by people, but by machines (although it is meant 
to be possible for people to read/write them) - and like C source code, 
it isn't very much more meaningful for english speakers.

It is now possible, using XML Schemas, to create an xml language where 
the elements can be named/described in multiple languages. Using RDF 
Ontology and Web Services we can expect it to be possible to write our 
own version of "HTML" using whatever tags we like, declaring it's 
relationship to HTML, and have it work - or right now we can send it 
out with an XSLT that turns it into HTML, or use an online service to 
serve HTML from our own XML language.

(I don't know of a Daniel who has an internationalisation team. There 
is an Internationisation Activity at W3C, which is a big reason why 
there is now good support for internationalisation in new technologies 
like XML Schema and RDF. I am not sure that "pestering" them is 
helpful, but looking at what they do is a good idea for anyone who has 
to work in more than one language  and isn't sure how to do it. 
http://www.w3.org/International )

cheers

Chaals

On Saturday, Feb 1, 2003, at 05:05 Australia/Melbourne, Jonathan 
Chetwynd wrote:

>
> I'm concerned about why HTML is so americanized eg <center>
> is Daniel's internationalisation team the one to pester about french 
> html?
>
>
--
Charles McCathieNevile           charles@sidar.org
Fundación SIDAR                       http://www.sidar.org

Received on Friday, 31 January 2003 20:12:25 UTC