Re: [xml-dev] Transformation of RelaxNG syntax into presentationof requi

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

Just as a side issue.

ISO standards must be written in either English or French.

The issue that would be problematic for many NBs in the case of UOF is 
the use of Chinese characters for element names. Already in OOXML there 
was criticism that the names were too cryptic, contractions being widely 
used, and that this impeded adequate review. Alphabetic-script people 
often have an expectation that they should be able to understand every 
word that they read, with a minimum of "fudging" or "placeholding" 
meanings. 

So I just don't see that it would pass the NB vote, even though there 
would be very great support that the underlying technologies should be 
exposed.  This is not anti-Chinese, it would be the same for a schema in 
Arabic or Greek or Cyrillic.  It needs to be reviewable: so at a minimum 
there would have to be English language equivalents for each Chinese 
name whereever it was used.  There are many national standards that are 
not suitable as international standards. And I think many NBs have 
closed the door on fast-track now, thankfully.

So an easier route would be an ISO Technical Report for UOF.

Another would be to extract the Chinese-specific parts of UOF and 
express them as a separate schema or vocabulary suitable for adoption or 
adaption by ODF, HTML and OOXML.  A UOF namespace. That would be a lot 
less work, too, and progress everyone forward, fast. 

Cheers
Rick