xml-dev - Re: Foreign Names

[Steven Champeon <schampeo@hesketh.com>]

On Sat, 15 Apr 2000, Simon St.Laurent wrote:
> At 03:16 PM 4/15/00 -0400, David Megginson wrote:
> >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.
> 
> But imagine the browser market if there was a simple standardized way to
> perform that mapping.  That would be amazing, and certainly worth considering.

I still don't understand why it's so complex. In a document that may
contain X element types, and which actually contains Y in any given
instance, you make 0 > Y >= X translations plus possibly more if you
also change the attribute naming. You would only need to include a map
of the standard names to those used in the document at hand; you
wouldn't even need to provide a new DTD if all that changes are the
identifiers. Just run it through a single pass transformation and
you're back to the original DTD.

You could also optimize things by only including a subset of those
transforms for elements actually in the current document.

Alternately, you could perform the transformation on the DTD, and
just introduce some form of versioning on the resultant alternate
DTDs. All you'd need is a different PI for each translation.

Maybe I'm missing something, but this just doesn't sound that hard.
Of course, it does add a layer of processing, if not necessarily a
substantial degree of complexity, for what benefit? It's one thing
to talk about universal translation for natural language, it's quite
another to talk about one-to-one mappings for documents whose markup
is usually, if not always, hidden from the human reader.

Steve

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