- From: Frank Ellermann <nobody@xyzzy.claranet.de>
- Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:07:33 +0200
- To: www-international@w3.org
- Cc: ltru@lists.ietf.org
Jon Hanna wrote: >> Tagging source code snippets as "zxx" would be barbaric. > Source code snippets often do contain no linguistic data. > However the following is in English: > alert("This is English");//This comment is English too. Maybe. It also depends on what you're doing. If your task is "translation" then... alarm("Das is deutsch");//Dieser Kommentar ist auch deutsch ...is likely no working script anymore. Or in the case of ABNF in an Internet-Draft a translator better stays away from it, including comments. I'd use xml:lang="" or maybe -- if I could take advantage of it with XSLT -- xml:lang="i-default". Theoretical example, in practice I care only about the ASCII output at the moment, meta-data details are a waste of time for this output style. But it could interest translators, if they get hold of the XML source. > I still don't buy that "" != "und". I think it depends on the context. In a context where either "und" or "" are allowed they are semantically identical to their syntactically invalid counterpart. In a context where both are allowed you're free to assign a meaning to "und" slightly different from "" (roughly RESET). > If "" != "und" then the RFC is buggy, since it clearly > requires that the latter not be used if a protocol permits > the former - a decision which only makes sense if they are > equivalent. I think SHOULD NOT means that you need a very good excuse for using it anyway. One good excuse would be the NMTOKEN in the XHTML 1.0 DTDs, that's explicitly listed as MAY in the RFC. Another excuse could be "I need it for some CSS magic", but the RFC doesn't say that this is a _good_ excuse. Obviously a good excuse are old documents written before the NMTOKEN was replaced by a CDATA in some version of XML. Or any old tool designed to produce old XML. It's "only" a SHOULD NOT, so consumers are not permitted to crash and burn if somebody (ab)uses "und". With a MUST NOT I'd agree that "und" would be always wrong, and "abort with error" would be a perfect implementation for a consumer. Frank
Received on Friday, 13 April 2007 14:15:11 UTC