David Powell wrote:
> I think that Atom's use of xml:lang is likely to be a significant
> problem to many implementors.
Life is tough! So what?
XML gives us a standard way to flag the language of things. Unless
there is a really compelling argument to do something different, it isn't
appropriate for us to diverge from the standard. If a compelling argument
*can* be found, then we probably should be talking about revising the base
XML specifications. We've spent decades working on providing the mechanisms
so that we can handle non-English data properly. Let's not go backwards with
Atom. RSS already made the mistake of including a "language" tag and it is a
mess that others are copying into other formats. Let's not contribute to
this pollution of the schema-space....
There are some fields in Atom which are "language-independent" or
"neutral" and thus it might be useful to explicitly prevent the use of
xml:lang tags for these elements or simply state that they have no meaning
if used. For instance, atom:id, atom:modified, atom:updated, have semantics
and syntax which is independent of language. However, all other fields
should be candidates for xml:lang.
bob wyman
