RE: [dita] Final xml:lang proposal

["Paul Prescod" <paul.prescod@blastradius.com>]

I don't 100% agree but overall the dir attribute proposal is quite tight
and unsurprising so I won't protest too much.

With respect to the DITA root element: unless someone can give a good
reason why it should NOT have attributes then I would suggest that there
is no real design issue to worry about.

With respect to the xml:lang -- I am still not enthusiastic about the
requirement that every DITA author think about the language issue. Not
would I be enthusiastic about guessing based on some property of the
user environment. I propose the following text:

"Applications should allow organizations with multilingual content
authoring requirements to ensure that every highest level topic element
and the root map element explicitly assign the xml:lang attribute."

OR

"For a DITA document that contains more than one language, tools should
ensure that the highest level element should always set the xml:lang
attribute to the primary language (and optionally the locale)."

NOT setting an xml:lang is not really a huge mistake for a unilingual
organization because it is easy to add them later in a batch process if
the orgnization ever branches out or is acquired. I want to keep the
barriers to authoring DITA as low as possible and there are many
one-person organizations out there that have no need to tag their
documents by language.

Alternately if others feel strongly that EVERY DITA document should have
xml:lang then there should be a sentence to that effect: 

"In all DITA documents, the highest level element should always set the
xml:lang attribute to the primary language (and optionally the locale)
that applies to the document."

We need to be consistent in our requests of authors using notepad and
those using more sophisticated tools. If always using xml:lang is a
strongly defined best-practice or even a requirement then that should be
described in the part of the document relevant to authors.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gershon L Joseph [mailto:gershon@tech-tav.com] 
> Sent: Sunday, April 09, 2006 11:55 PM
> To: Paul Prescod; dita@lists.oasis-open.org
> Subject: RE: [dita] Final xml:lang proposal
> 
> Hi Paul,
> 
> 1. The dita root element does not have any attributes, and we 
> did not want to add xml:lang to it without in-depth design 
> analysis. To keep things minimalistic for the 1.1 release, we 
> chose to keep it where previous DITA releases allow it.
> 
> 2. The best practice recommendation is that xml:lang should 
> be set in the DITA XML files. However, we don't expect the 
> users to explicitly set it.
> Usually the authoring/translation tool will set the xml:lang 
> attribute on behalf of the user.