Re: ASN.1 and XML

[Rick Jelliffe <ricko@allette.com.au>]

From:  "Olivier DUBUISSON" <Olivier.Dubuisson@francetelecom.com>

> But AFAIK nobody has ever produced a national version of ASN.1, probably
> for the good reason that he/she would have to implement the associated
> tool! Actually the same story goes with most programming languages,
doesn't
> it?

Until the mid-90s! It has been my major task to promote "native language
markup"
as a fundamental issue of internationalization.  XML has it now, SGML allows
it, and the ISO guide on programming languages (when I last saw it)
recommends it. I believe it is common for databases to support
native-language fields, for file systems to support native language file and
directory names, and for scripting and programming languages to allow
native-language variables.  There is even a Unicode Consortium technical
report giving the details of which characters are best.

Technology that does not allow direct expression of local concepts is
discriminatory.
It disables people with poor expressiveness in Latin-script languages from
programming.  It provides an extra layer of hindrance that acts to
perpetuate the centre-peripheral technological world we have now.  It
presumes that all words we want to use have an adequate or standardized and
recognizable romanization: if a Hong Kong person romanizes a character
should they use Mandarin or Cantonese phonetical transcription?

In some countries, the technological elite uses English and is happy with
the status quo. In other countries, even the technological elite is not
comfortable in English.

I would hope that Japan and other ISO members would start to adopt a policy
of diverting all International Standards to Technical Report status if they
are gratuitously tied to ASCII rather than to Unicode. It is shameful.

With SGML, it was quite easy to get native language markup features added,
because there already was a user requirement at ISO that SGML should have no
bias towards particular native languages.   It seems that the standard
keywords to a language can be Latin only (e.g. minimum literals in ASCII),
but anything that requires description of objects in the real world should
be open to any language and script.

ASN.1 could not claim to be as useful as XML without it.

Cheers
Rick