- From: Jonathan Marsh <jmarsh@microsoft.com>
- Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 15:45:12 -0700
- To: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>, <www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org>
> -----Original Message----- > From: www-xml-xinclude-comments-request@w3.org [mailto:www-xml-xinclude- > comments-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Elliotte Rusty Harold > Sent: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 5:35 AM > To: www-xml-xinclude-comments@w3.org > Subject: Language attributes > > > I understand the point of the language retention in the new draft. I > haven't implemented it yet, but I don't expect it to be too hard. I'm > not sure how useful this will be in practice, but it doesn't feel > like it will hurt too much. > > I do wonder, however, why you felt it necessary to add a new Infoset > property here? Unlike the included sets property, this is not > directly related to the functionality of XInclude. It is something > that could have been added to the original Infoset spec, and wasn't. > Sneaking it in here doesn't feel right. We did indeed discuss providing this as a separate specification, but didn't want to hold up XInclude for a new dependency and this seemed the easiest way to get the [language] property out there. > There are a few of other > issues with this: > > 1. As far as I know no API or tool provides specific support for > this. i.e. there's no getLanguage call in DOM, or XOM, or XSLT. > Everyone just reads the xml:lang attributes if they need to know this. This may be a chicken and egg thing. But just looking for xml:lang attributes is one way to implement the [language] property. > 2. Adding language as an infoset property in addition to the xml:lang > attribute opens up the possibility that these could get out of sync. > That's a big enough problem in the Infoset already without adding to > it here. That's why there's a fixup section. > I suggest simply removing all the verbiage about the [language] > property and simply defining this in terms of an xml:lang attribute > information item. I don't think this would have any practical affect > on implementations, but it would make the spec smaller, simpler, and > cleaner. We'll consider it, but you have correctly detected an ulterior motive to generalize this behavior beyond XInclude. > -- > > Elliotte Rusty Harold > elharo@metalab.unc.edu > Effective XML (Addison-Wesley, 2003) > http://www.cafeconleche.org/books/effectivexml > > http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN%3D0321150406/ref%3Dnosim/cafeaula it > A
Received on Wednesday, 14 April 2004 18:45:19 UTC