RE: Transliteration

The use of MIME-based document attributes should be limited to include
only those elements that are absolutely necessary for the proper
automated interpretation and display of the data. "content-type"
is necessary, but decorations of content-type as to versions, etc., are not.
The "charset" is necessary, in order to choose the appropriate display
mechanism, and "content-language" is necessary, not as a descriptive
element "this is really in language X", but only as a way of choosing
the appropriate language-specific display mechanisms, e.g., hyphenation,
glyph choices.

It may well be useful to tag a resource with additional information,
such as the language transliteration scheme, etc., but this tagging
should not be done with MIME labels. Use of RDF is probably more
appropriate, where a full elaboration of all of the resource descriptions
you want is quite possible.

Larry
--
http://www.parc.xerox.com/masinter

Received on Friday, 16 October 1998 14:38:31 UTC