Additional i18n RDF last call comments

Dear RDF WG,

These are additional internationalization-related comments that
haven't been discussed by the I18N WG yet. Please accept them as
personal comments. They may be confirmed as WG comments next week.


primer, 2.1, first para: It may help translation to change
'state this in English' to 'state this in a natural language
such as English'.


primer, fig. 3 and all related examples/discussion: Instead of
http://www.example.org/terms/language,
http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/language should be used. There
is no reason to use a made-up property when there is a well-
defined property from a well-known vocabulary that is used
in the same example.

[btw, the description of this property currently reads:
 >>>>>>>>
<dc:description xml:lang="en-US">Recommended best practice is to use RFC 
3066 [RFC3066],
		which, in conjunction with ISO 639 [ISO639], defines two-
		and three-letter primary language tags with optional
		subtags.  Examples include "en" or "eng" for English,
		"akk" for Akkadian, and "en-GB" for English used in the
		United Kingdom.</dc:description>
 >>>>>>>>

This is misleading because RFC 3066 explicitly disallows "eng"
(or more generally, three-letter codes when there is an equivalent
two-letter code). If possible, please forward this comment or tell
us where to send it.]


primer, section 2.3, fig 5 and related: The address example is on the
boundary of a generic internationalized address. 'postalCode' is
very generic, whereas 'street' and 'state' may not be generic enough.
Also, the address misses the country information. At least this should
be added; the fields can then be understood as country-specific.


primer, example 22: The explanation mentions 'the escaping of reserved
characters such as ...'. This may be highly misleading. "<" (as a literal
character) already has to be escaped, and ">" already is escaped in
the example. Probably changing to "the uniform escaping or unescaping
of characters" should do the job. On average, there may be more
unescaping of NCRs when canonicalizing than escaping.


primer, general: a few examples in section 6 use xml:lang. It should be
used much more.


In section 6.5, the use of xml:lang for rdfs:label but not for
rdfs:comment is confusing. Does this suggest that rdfs:label
can be in multiple languages, but rdfs:comment can only be
in English?


primer, section 6.2: Greece in French is written with grave accent,
in HTML as Gr&egrave;ce.


primer, section 6.3: "Unicode information (such as unicode:script)":
It is probably better to change this to "Character usage information
(with properties such as unicode:script)". But the use of an 'Unicode'
namespace prefix may suggest to some reader that this is some official
vocabulary defined by the Unicode consortium.



Regards,    Martin.

Received on Friday, 7 November 2003 07:54:30 UTC