- From: Charles McCathieNevile <charles@sidar.org>
- Date: Sat, 1 Feb 2003 12:12:07 +1100
- To: Jonathan Chetwynd <j.chetwynd@btinternet.com>
- Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
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