- From: Brett Zamir <brettz9@yahoo.com>
- Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:23:43 +0800
- To: www-international@w3.org
Greetings all, I am not sure whether this may have been done before (I'd be surprised if it hadn't), but since I haven't heard of it, here it goes... I wrote a preliminary XML language using Chinese characters to represent the elements, attributes, and specified attribute values of XHTML--no DTD or XML Schema yet--to be transformed by a XSLT sheet that I devised (with translation help from my wife) into XHTML (or a modular variety thereof). It manages to work fine (with a few nuances depending on whether viewing in Explorer or Firefox), at least for the relatively small files I've tested it on. I am sure that the translations must not be wholly suitable (my wife is just a beginner in X/HTML and my own Chinese is quite limited) and even my XSL stylesheet may have a few shortcomings, but I figure it is a beginning, if no such language already exists. I have also designed one version of the stylesheet with entities, so it can be easily localized into other languages (another version is without entities so that it will work with more server-side transformation software like PHP5's XSL extension). I would also like to see CSS and possibly even a decent feature set of Javascript and PHP made into a localized XML representation which could then be transformed into actual CSS (or Javascript, PHP, etc.). Even with English there would be its special uses (easily styling the files (e.g., code-folding on XHTML-displayed versioning like online Subversion repositories), translating from one computer language to another, etc.). You can see an example of this "Chinese XHTML" at http://bahai-library.com/zamir/docxml.php5?tpl=chin_gb2312 . If you "view->source" for this file in Explorer or Firefox, you will see that the code is in fact all Chinese (our translation may be inadequate, but we can change that). XSL can also be used on the server to make the translation into English code before it comes to the visitor. You can go to http://bahai-library.com/zamir/docxml.php5?tpl=chin_utf and you can see when you view the source, that the page has been converted to English (though the content is still Chinese). You can see the XSL translating file itself at http://bahai-library.com/zamir/chin.xsl or http://bahai-library.com/zamir/chin_gb2312.xsl . (For Explorer, I am guessing because of an error in it, we have to send GB2312 unless we change it on the server first, even though UTF-8 would be better). If you go to the former file and view its source, you can see in alphabetical order exactly how we translated each English word into Chinese. This file will be useful even to translate into other languages, but it doesn't usually work as well if it is transformed on the server, so that is why I have the other XSL file (which I created just by an easy find-and-replace script applied to the former). (I've also started writing a little example sheet of the code at http://bahai-library.com/zamir/docxml.php5?tpl=chin but as far as this file, I am just beginning on it, and it will need the notes translated into Chinese.) Let me know if anyone wants to help promote this, help develop it, etc. I'm limited in the time I can dedicate to it, but I wanted to get it out there.... (The working code, for this, by the way was written in the Chinese code, transformed server-side by PHP5's XSL extension into the "English XHTML".) Feedback is welcome! best wishes, Brett
Received on Monday, 5 March 2007 16:24:45 UTC