xml-dev - Re: Foreign Names

[David Megginson <david@megginson.com>]

Steven Champeon <schampeo@hesketh.com> writes:

> On 15 Apr 2000, David Megginson wrote:
> > As our closest parallel, note that no one has yet (to my knowledge)
> > produced and deployed a version of HTML with alternative element-type
> > names.  Perhaps some day a markup language for a really cool app will
> > come from Korea or Finland, and we'll just have to get used to Korean
> > or Finnish element type names (if the app was originally designed just 
> > for local use).
> 
> Why is this such a big deal? Surely it can't be that difficult to convert
> any SGML/XML document from one vocabulary to another using XSLT or a Perl
> script. We often use long_descriptive_function_names in Javascript during
> development and then optimize them later for delivery. Why not do the same
> with XML documents?

It's relatively simple to rename elements, but extraordinarily
complicated to translate from one vocab to another in the general
case.  When you're looking at a large network of users and producers
rather than a unidirectional information-supply chain, even a simple
renaming introduces too much complexity -- imagine the browser market
if each natural language had its own, localized HTML vocabulary.


All the best,


David

-- 
David Megginson                 david@megginson.com
           http://www.megginson.com/

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