RE: New Working Group Note: Best Practices for XML Internationalization

You decide on the standardized representation and this can include the presumed context.
Then you know whether the text needs adjustment when it is placed in a particular environment. 

-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas Davidson [mailto:ddavidso@apple.com] 
Sent: Friday, February 15, 2008 12:19 PM
To: Tex Texin
Cc: Richard Ishida; WWW International
Subject: Re: New Working Group Note: Best Practices for XML Internationalization


On Feb 15, 2008, at 11:50 AM, Tex Texin wrote:

> I should be able to extract a string from a database and have it work 
> equally well regardless of the context.

The issue of extracting a string from a database and embedding it into a document seems to me to be a particularly knotty one.  How do you form the strings in your database so that they will display well if you do not know in advance whether the context in which they will be embedded will be LTR or RTL?  On the other side, how do you embed strings in your document if you do not know in advance what sort of bidi content they will have?  A mismatched bidi formatting code in an embedded string, for example, could cause problems.

Douglas Davidson

Received on Friday, 15 February 2008 20:27:41 UTC