Re: [office] xml:lang settings. Confused.

["Dave Pawson" <dave.pawson@gmail.com>]

On 19/06/07, Eike Rathke <erack@sun.com> wrote:

> Btw: NIH? Not Invented Here? (please bear in mind that this is an
> international list and not all participants have a full understanding of
> every English acronym and abbreviations)

I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking. Yes, not invented here.



> > Even stronger, please can we change to xml:lang then standard XML
> > processors can do what they should do?
>
> How exactly should a "change to" look like?

That the specification states how xml:lang is set, and that the attribute
is used as per http://www.w3.org/TR/xml11/#sec-lang-tag .
It would need to address the relationship to the various other metadata
usages (or remove them which sounds simpler).


>
>
> > >> I'm curious. When I initially open a document authored in Japanese or
> > >> Chinese,
> > >> how would I know whether to look at style:language-asian or fo:language?
> > >
> > >I guess you don't without actually looking at the script type of the
> > >textual content.
> >
> > Which, IMHO, is a big hole in the ODF spec.
>
> Seconded. On the other hand, having two attributes, for example Western
> and CTL, for an entire paragraph gets rid of the need to define
> alternating xml:lang (or whatever) attributes whenever the script type
> changes. And having alternating CTL and Roman scripts is quite common.

Why can't the xml:lang be used throughout?
For clarity where does 'western' finish and (presumably ) Eastern start?
xml:lang is so much simpler.


> > >The <dc:language> element may give a hint what might be the "primary
> > >language";
> >
> > Give a hint? Surely the spec needs to be stronger, and explicit in how
> > the default language is obtained.
>
> Well, the <office:document-meta> <office:meta> <dc:creator> element
> specifies the document's default language.

Shouldn't that be dc:language?

I said this is only a hint
> because it may get overridden at any time, and usually also is on
> a paragraph level. So in practice it is not sufficient to only obtain
> the <dc:creator> value, one must follow also the document's flow.

Yes, just as with xml:lang. The value found first in the xml is
generally the one used as the main language of the document though,
that's all I was was getting at.


>
>
> > >however, if overridden by character attributes it may as well
> > >be useless. Independent of whether a fo:language-asian is present
> > >additionally to fo:language or not.
> >
> > I can't respond through knowledge to that one. I certainly object
> > to basing text string language on character attributes though.
> > That sounds quite wrong.
>
> May be misleading. Character attributes here means characters in the
> sense of a portion of text. If there is a language assigned to a portion
> of text the character attributes span that portion of text with an
> fo:language attribute. How else would you assign a language to
> a sequence of characters?

To an xml element. Use the xml:lang to modify the current language
which remains in effect for all children of that element, or until overridden
by another use of xml:lang

http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-when-xmllang


>
>
> > An I18N mess?
>
> Seems like.
>
> > How to get this on the agenda for  1.2?
>
> I'd like to hear what the decision was to have this Western/CJK/CTL
> approach in ODF. To me it seems it originated in some behavior of that
> MS-Word text processor.

Oh dear. That doesn't sound good.


regards

-- 
Dave Pawson
XSLT XSL-FO FAQ.
http://www.dpawson.co.uk