RE: [dita-translation] Changes to documentation of xml:lang and translate attributes

["Gershon L Joseph" <gershon@tech-tav.com>]

Felix, has the ITC defined a separate attribute for locale? If so, what did
you call it? If the ITS specifies separate attributes for language and
locale, then I think DITA should too. I suppose they'd be xml:lang and
xml:locale? Please could you confirm, and I'll add them to my proposal.

Thanks also for the links, I'll add them to my documentation proposal. 


Best Regards,
Gershon

-----Original Message-----
From: Felix Sasaki [mailto:fsasaki@w3.org] 
Sent: Friday, March 03, 2006 2:14 AM
To: Robert D Anderson
Cc: gershon@tech-tav.com; bhertz@sdl.com; 'Bryan Schnabel'; Charles Pau;
'Lieske, Christian'; Dave A Schell; dita-translation@lists.oasis-open.org;
dpooley@sdl.com; 'Richard Ishida'; 'Jennifer Linton'; mambrose@sdl.com;
patrickk@scriptware.nl; pcarey@lexmark.com; Peter.Reynolds@lionbridge.com;
rfletcher@sdl.com; Sukumar.Munshi@lionbridge.com;
tony.jewtushenko@productinnovator.com; 'Yves Savourel'
Subject: Re: [dita-translation] Changes to documentation of xml:lang and
translate attributes

Hi Robert, all,

Sorry for the sporadic participation. Below I have some comments.

Robert D Anderson wrote:
> Hi Gershon,
> 
> I think it looks good, I just wanted to clarify a few points:
> 1. For translate, it says that the default is no. I just wanted to 
> clarify that this is a processing default, rather than one set in the 
> DTD or Schema. If the value for every element is defaulted to "no" in 
> the doctype, then when you read the file in to a parser it will appear 
> that the value is set everywhere. So, this would prevent the value from
inheriting.
> 
> 2. For the first sentence of the xml:lang description, we should 
> indicate that it is not only for the language, it also sets the 
> locale. I'd suggest either "Specifies the locale of the element 
> content."
> or
> "Specifies the language and locale of the element content."


There are problems with combining locale to language identification:

<p xml:lang="en-US">A beer in Germany costs <ptr value="5"/>.</p>

The @value should be spelled out as "5 Euro", but if you map the language
"en-US" to a locale, it would be "5 Dollar". So what you need here is a
separation between language and locale identification.

> 
> I realize that the current spec only uses the term language. I think 
> this has led to some confusion in the past.
> 
> 3. For xml:lang, I do not think that the spec should explicitly 
> designate that the default is English. This should probably be up to 
> the tools. The DITA Open Toolkit sets the default language with a 
> parameter in the stylesheets, so that it is possible for users to 
> change the default if needed. If we do want to suggest a default, then 
> how about something like "When no xml:lang value is supplied and no 
> external method is used to set a default, the default value of English is
assumed."
> 
> I also realize that the current spec already specifies a default of 
> English, but I've heard people express the desire to set a different 
> default when authoring in another language.

I think this is a very important point.

> 
> 4. I am not sure what is meant by this:
> "A list of supported values is given in xml:lang values."
> The current spec references ISO-3166 for Country Codes and RFC 3066 
> for Language Codes. Different applications (as well as different
> specializations) may choose to support only a subset of all languages 
> (for example, the DITA toolkit supports only 47 of the defined 
> locales, and warns if users specify values it does not support). Since 
> DITA was developed, the toolkit has added support for two additional 
> locales (be-by and uk-ua). If we continue to reference the 
> authoritative sources, then our description will remain current and 
> correct at all times, even as new locales are created and new tool support
is added.

The value of xml:lang is RFC 3066 or its successor, see
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#sec-lang-tag . RFC 3066, see
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3066.txt , defines as the first subtag 2-letter
subtags as ISO 639 part 1 language codes, and 3-letter subtags as ISO 639
part 1 language codes.
As the second subtag, 2-letter are ISO 3166 country codes.
It might be useful to mention these sources directly.
There is also a successor or RFC 3066, see
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-ltru-registry-14.txt . It is
100% backward compatibly with RFC 3066, but allows also for specifying new
kinds of subtags (esp. for script, region and variant).
That might be worth mentioning.

Regards,

Felix