RE: Language attributes

> -----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