Re: Language declaration question

["Christopher R. Maden" <crism@maden.org>]

At 04:19 31-08-2001, Hewko, Doug wrote:
>Out of curiousity, when you specify an encoding value in a XML document,
>where does the XML processor obtain the encoding values from? Would the
>processor return an error, automatically download the encoding value, or
>does it come already with every known encoding value? (I have difficulty
>believing the latter.)
>
>For example:
>
>1) I am programming XML for your MS IE 5.5 browser (assume it supports the
>ISO-8859-6 values). I happen to specify the an Arabic language coding,
>ISO-8859-6. What would someone get if they have the basic American version
>of Windows?

You're conflating two issues: encoding and language.

To support ISO-8859-6, MSXML needs to know how the encoded characters in 
8859-6 map into Unicode.  This is easily done with a mapping 
table.  *Displaying* Arabic characters is something different, and requires 
that the necessary fonts and support be installed.  The parser has it 
pretty easy here.

>2) This time I am programming server-side, in Cocoon (or Saxon, whatever).
>Same type of question. The server supports the languages (don't know how but
>let's say it does). What would a user get when accessing a XML document in a
>different language?

Do you mean languages, or encodings?  The server almost certainly doesn't 
actually deal with languages.

-Chris
-- 
Christopher R. Maden, Principal Consultant, HMM Consulting Int'l, Inc.
DTDs/schemas - conversion - ebooks - publishing - Web - B2B - training
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