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Henri Sivonen wrote:
> It was an honest question. When I look around how software development
> works in Finland and compare that with the alleged requirements for
> other locales I can't help but to think that perhaps English speakers
> are trying to be over-polite at the expense of XML 1.0 compatibility
> without the actual demand being there.
One aspect that you seem to be failing to take into account based on
your comparison with Finland is that everyone in Finland speaks seven
languages fluently. It's a factor of genuine importance, anyone who can
compare the experience of getting around with English as their sole
language in Helsinki and in Tokyo will tell you that one works a lot
better than the other. You grew up in a country that has arguably the
best foreign language education system on the planet, the other 6
billion of us weren't so lucky ;)
In France for instance, where people generally only speak French,
variables, element, and attribute names are very, very often entirely in
French. Usually they map to ASCII because it is trivial to just skip the
accent or cedilla, but I can tell you that they would be seriously angry
if such trivial transliterations were not possible.
If you don't speak English (or not well at all) -- which is *far* more
common than you imagine -- and have to use weird transliterations in an
alphabet that's not your own, someone is making your job a lot harder
than it should be.
> The rationale for migrating to XML 1.1 is that one could use element
> names in languages that XML 1.0 does not allow in element names. XML 1.0
> already allows element names many non-ASCII languages.
It's not just element and attribute names though, see the weekdays
enumeration here:
http://www.w3.org/2005/03/02-ishida-tech-plen/
> To assess whether this rationale for XML 1.1 make practical sense, it
> would seem natural to observe whether people are actually using to
> non-ASCII possibilities of XML 1.0.
They are, very much so.
> If research shows that the non-ASCII
> possibilities provided by even XML 1.0 are not actually used to a
> significant extent, why bother with breaking interoperability by
> extending the non-ASCII features?
I also think that you're blowing the interoperability issues of XML 1.1
way out of proportion. If the people who rant that XML 1.1 is a CDK
(Céline Dion Karaoke) Level Event spent a tenth of the time they waste
complaining about XML 1.1 on helping out with upgrades we'd be done
already. Let us not forget the brilliant things that we the XML
community have managed to produce over the past year. Surely the
transition to XML 1.1 is a tractable problem...
> Writing Finnish and programming punctuation (;{}[]<>/\=) at the same
> time is inconvenient given the usual input methods. I'd imagine the
> inconvenience with non-Latin writing to be even greater.
If you saw just how fast people here in Tokyo can type Japanese text on
a mobile phone keyboard, you wouldn't worry about that :)
--
Robin Berjon
Research Scientist
Expway, http://expway.com/
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