Re: [ubl-ttsc] Re: [ubl] Use cases (UBL compliance)

["Anthony B. Coates" <abcoates@londonmarketsystems.com>]

** Reply to message from Ray Seddigh <RaySeddigh100@yahoo.com> on Thu, 08 Jan
2004 02:41:27 -0800

I'm still away in Oz, but watching the list as best I can.

> - If one were to adhere to the spirit of making UBL documents readable 
> by both humans and machines, then translatability of tags would make 
> millions of UBL components and documents human readable, and programs 
> more easily debuggable. Making computing artifacts human readable is a 
> prized desideratum, as borne out from decades of useful experience with 
> SGML, LISP, and many other computing models. 

As a general rule, I oppose anglocentrism in international standards.  However,
I have never yet supported the concept multiple language versions of XML
element/attribute names for any specification I have worked on.  Why?  Well,
for a start, it makes applications harder to debug.  Sure, if you stay within a
single language region, you might find local language versions of
element/attribute names help debugging, but as soon as you cross a language
border, life just gets much harder.  Application producers may not support all
language versions of the element/attribute names, since although it seems easy
to a programmer to make the names configurable, it increases the amount of
testing required.  You have to redo the same tests for every new language, and
also test that every language-to-language conversion works.  Lots of companies
just cannot afford this expense.

So, allowing the element/attribute names to be localised would do little more
than add to the existing barriers of trade across international borders.  For
my part, I wouldn't support localised versions of XML element/attribute names
until the day arrives that XML parsers and validators support such
localisation.  At the time, the cost of supporting localised element/attribute
names would become greatly reduced, and support by application developers might
be feasible.  For the moment, though, I don't think UBL should try to be in
advance of XML itself when it comes to localised element/attribute names.

	Cheers,
		Tony.
====
Anthony B. Coates
London Market Systems Limited
33 Throgmorton Street, London, EC2N 2BR 
http://www.londonmarketsystems.com/
mailto:abcoates@londonmarketsystems.com
Mobile/Cell: +44 (79) 0543 9026
[MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language), http://www.mddl.org/]
[FpML Arch WG Member (Financial Products Markup Language), http://www.fpml.org/]
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