On Jan 17, 2005, at 12:47 AM, David Powell wrote:
If it turns out that it's really an issue, couldn't you achieve the desired effect by restricting xml:lang to appear only on atom:entry and atom:feed?
See my reply to Martin. Restricting the position of xml:lang could make things worse, unless we also restrict its inheritance - which I'm not sure that we are allowed to do.
What do you think about only allowing it on atom:content and on Text constructs?
I'm very concerned. Any time you're processing text and you want to display it or index it for search, or do pretty well anything, if you don't know what language it's in you're probably going to make damaging mistakes. Consider a Turkish author whose name begins with 'I'... feed that to a search engine that doesn't know it's in Turkish and the results will be wrong. Suppose Joi Ito wants to list his name in Japanese but still write in English; or the the reverse. Suppose I'm publishing in Moscow and I want my copyright statement to be in Russian irrespective of what language I'm writing in?
I think that if we allow xml:lang then it should definitely be restricted. The current "xml:lang everywhere" situation is only simple to implement if you assume that your implementation stores all of it's data in an XML DOM.
This statement is not correct; it's simple to implement correctly if you're doing stream processing.
And I repeat, anything that is remotely general-purpose needs to associate each little chunk of text with its language, if it wants to operate correctly. Sometimes being correct has convenience costs.
I'm veering towards -1 on this one, absent a few more people putting up their hands to say "we must have it". -Tim
