Re: Notes on the draft polyglot document Polyglot document

Le 20-juin-10 à 18:54, Pat Hayes a écrit :

> On Jun 10, 2010, at 7:14 AM, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
>> the term is already recognised as meaning "... written in a valid  
>> form of multiple programming languages" [1]. Although the words has  
>> its roots in linguistics, using its existing meaning as a computer  
>> term is quite reasonable.
>
> I disagree. HTML and XML specs might be written by geeks, but they  
> will be being used by an audience about 10|3 times as large. The  
> meaning of the word "polyglot" in its normal (not 'linguistic')  
> usage has been stable since the 17th century; the computing term is  
> at most a decade old, and is fairly marginal even in that narrow  
> community. And in any case, in this application, "poly" is an  
> egregious exaggeration.

I fully agree with Pat here and I find the point on the diversity of  
"poly" to be well made: to the eyes of many XHTML and HTML are  
(almost) the same thing.

It's as if you would call polyglott a person speaking US-english and  
UK-english.

I would find cross-standard a lot more correct.

I note that the word polyglott and the word multilingual are now in  
big hypes politically hence the confusion can only grow.

paul