Re: Just a Little Explanaton for Veering (RE: Blueberry/Unicode/ XML)

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

 From: "Elliotte Rusty Harold" <elharo@metalab.unc.edu>


> FMI, has anyone seen a widely distributed XML application that crosses
national and linguistic borders in which the element names are in any
language other than English?

HTML now has "ruby".  Which is Japanese for a kind of annotation, derived
ultimately from old English term  for a certain font size (6/5 points?).
There is no English word for Ruby (except the more general term "Interlinear
annotation" which does not capture it.)

But in other scripts, I hope not!   I think there has never been an
expectation on anyone's part that, e.g. Bahasa would replace English.    I
have used a Swedish DTD once. In the end I had to translate into English
because it was too horrible to work in a foreign language.

There is one school of thought that when XSLT become ubiquitous, it will
allow native script bindings of English-based markup languages.

So there might be a Japanese SVG, with the XSLT being a 1:1 mapping
between Japanese names and English names, for example.

One thing going against that is that it is difficult to type ideographs, so
many CJK programmers prefer to use ASCII where possible.  And it can make
things visually more distinct to have different scripts for different roles.
So I don't think anyone is claiming that ASCII does not have some useful
properties that may be appropriate for certain things.

The idea that there will be non-ASCII public DTDs for use in multinational
situations has never been part, as far as I am aware, of
the discussions or rational for providing native-language markup.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe