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

[Peter Flynn <peter@silmaril.ie>]

On Thu, 12 Jul 2001, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> 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?).

5.5pt. It was known in the USA as "Agate".

> There is no English word for Ruby (except the more general term "Interlinear
> annotation" which does not capture it.)

Glosses come close.

> 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.

I've used private DTDs in languages I speak and they don't cause
any more problems than one in my native tongue. Bad design and
good design transcend linguistic boundaries.

> 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.

No, although technically there is no reason why a DTD with the
relevant entities (like the TEI) should not allow for wholesale
"renaming" of elements into another language while keeping the
element structure identical (modulo the probblems of the current
discussion, of course).

///Peter