Re: Two different sets of experiences about non-English identifiers

[Joel Rees <rees@server.mediafusion.co.jp>]

Everywhere <host@xmleverywhere.com> exclaimed:

> English is the lingua franca for business, ergo XML
> tags should only contain ASCII.  That's a good
> guideline if you're writing a  DTD for commerce.
> But other applications need not heed this advice.

International commerce, maybe.

Now I just sit here with visions of my former employer (a Fujitsu/IBM/etc.
dealer/consultant) trying to run all their financial processing in English,
or of trying to get his customers' office minis running all that processing
in English. Great Budget Drain! (And the suspicion it would generate from
his customers!)

The only place we need English markup is at the interface to the
international market, and it doesn't take much to translate between Japanese
and English markup at the interface -- just a little XSLT, or even Perl, and
a translation list of the English and Japanese names.

> I do not completely understand Unicode or character
> encodings in general.  Few people do and fewer
> tools support them.  Operating systems don't
> handle non-ASCII code pages very well.

Code pages? Most computer users here are completely oblivious to code pages.
Japanese OSses (including MSWindows, Macintosh) are plenty happy to use
Kanji in file names. Some Linux releases even use aliases or something
similar to provide a lot of the shell commands with Japanese names. Okay,
Mac OS X is sort of stuck in between, because they are trying to use UNICODE
at the system level without causing problems for file systems using
shift-JIS. But you only notice it when you open a terminal window and run a
shell.

Cheers,

Joel Rees
programmer -- rees@mediafusion.co.jp
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