RE: [Comment on WS-I18N WD]

Hi Dan,

(Chair/Editor hats off. These are personal comments.)

I've looked over your comments. In general I'm okay with them, although I do have a few things to note:

1. The existing document has an <i18n:preferences> element that, among other things, can contain some of the information you are looking for. In particular, it already contains items 6-9 on your list. The point of having a preferences element, in my mind, was to provide access to these specific settings for cases where one needs such detail. Can you better enumerate why these should be promoted to full-fledged elements?

2. I've seen requests for a UI language separate from locale before, but I'm not sure that they make a lot of sense. Which takes precedence? What does it mean to have a German locale but French UI messages? Other than writing I18N demos, what use case do you have for this?

My concern is that it will be very difficult for people to understand the separate element's uses, especially since each of them is then exposed to the BCP 47 Lookup negotiation mechanism. If we were to make some changes here it would be to make <i18n:locale> a language priority list for requests and a single-item for responses.

3. (Felix) The examples of locale identifiers should be consistent in their use of - or _ for separators. Excepting the special values $default and $neutral, I think we should mandate the use of BCP 47 (ie hyphens) here.

4. Charset, IMO, is a bad idea. I am not sure of a use case for it. Would it imply that the response should use a specific encoding for attachments or for the SOAP message? Isn't this the job of Content-Type? I'm sure we can think of some very specific cases that imply it, but it strikes me that the best way to discourage Bad Behavior for this sort of thing is to make people create their own, separate policy item for encoding management when they need it. (We've spent years getting people used to the idea that Unicode is a Good Thing, especially on the wire and that if you need some other encoding you should transcode to/from it on your end.)

Best Regards,

Addison

Addison Phillips
Globalization Architect -- Lab126

Internationalization is not a feature.
It is an architecture.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: www-international-request@w3.org [mailto:www-international-
> request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Felix Sasaki
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 8:39 AM
> To: Dan Chiba
> Cc: www-international@w3.org
> Subject: Re: [Comment on WS-I18N WD]
>
>
> Hi Dan,
>
> Dan Chiba さんは書きました:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > I posted a comment on WS-I18N on the www-i18n-comments list and
> wanted
> > to reach the folks on this list, too.
> >
> > http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-i18n-

> comments/2008Jun/0000.html
> >
> > Your input would be appreciated.
>
> I had said this before in our private conversation, so just to
> repeat it
> in public: I'm fine with your proposals.
>
> Felix

Received on Friday, 13 June 2008 18:48:59 UTC