On 10/31/08 03:22, wrote:
> I could see burning a lot of digital ink on trying to solve this problem.
> But we might consider when this is something akin to trying to define
> "bold" in text, or defining what the "red" value in an RGB triplet means,
> or defining a language code. We're allowed to specify a language code of
> "de_ch", but we are not obliged to define and explain what exactly
> comprises the Swiss Germany dialect.
>
That's a very interesting observation. On the hand I understand that is
is useful to have normative references for the calendars used. But on
the other hand, we use language codes (which are defined by an ISO
standard), but they don't tell us anything how to implement them, nor
what is correct. So, if we have for instance "de-DE", then this does not
tell us what words a spell checker has to be consider to be correct, or
what a grammar checkers needs to check. Well, both does not have an
influence of the formatting of a document, but hyphenation is also
controlled by language tags, and this has an influence on the formatting.
In addition, we had a so called "Rechtschreibreform" in Germany two or
three years ago, where the spelling of many words has been changed. The
language code does not tell you whether the old or the new spelling of a
word is correct. This is also not considered to be an issue.
So, given that, I start to believe that some information what the
calendar values are may be useful, but that normative references are not
required.
Michael
--
Michael Brauer, Technical Architect Software Engineering
StarOffice/OpenOffice.org
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