Re: [Ltru] Re: For review: Tagging text with no language

I agree with you. I would also say that indicating that computer languages 
have "no linguistic content" is not quite accurate for the same reasons 
you cite below and disagrees with the origin of the zxx tag, which was to 
indicate a total absence of language, not content which is not in a 
natural language. 

Karen Broome

www-international-request@w3.org wrote on 04/13/2007 01:08:33 PM:

> 
> On Fri, 13 Apr 2007, Karen_Broome@spe.sony.com wrote:
> 
> > With respect to computer language snippets, isn't that what the <code> 
tag
> > is for -- at least in XHTML?
> 
> <code> has been in HTML since the beginning, and it indeed indicates 
> computer code, or "computer language".
> 
> But to make things more difficult, computer code - such as program code, 

> operating system commands, or markup - can be regarded as being in some 
> human language(s) in the sense that the identifiers may have been formed 

> from words in human languages and the comments are written in some human 

> languages. Knowing the language of computer code can be relevant at 
least 
> for two purposes:
> a) the understandability of the code to human readers depends on whether
>     they understand the human language(s) used
> b) speech synthesis would benefit from the use of language information.
> Moreover, a checking program could e.g. check that the code follows the 
> syntactic rules of the programming, command, or markup "language" _and_ 
> check the comments using a suitable human language spelling checker.
> 
> Thus, I would say that the human language some text and the role of that 

> text as computer code are in a sense orthogonal.
> 
> -- 
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
> 
> 
>