Daniel Owens wrote:
- The default should not necessarily be English. This is what Chris is
suggesting. The default display ought to be in the language that the
module developer decides (usually the language of that module, except in
the case of ancient texts, in which case probably English should be the
default).
My recommendation was actually that the default be the language of the
module (what I have referred to, perhaps somewhat confusingly, as the
localized name). In the absence of that, I recommended using the
English. For old (all existing) content, the fallback would be the
current combination of localized plus English that is found in most modules.
For ancient languages, I would recommend simply using the "English" (or
more generally Latin/Latin-script) form.
> One further item I would like to propose is an Author field. This is
not
so important for Bibles (and maybe for most dictionaries), but for most
books the author is a major factor in whether one uses it or not (way
more important than title). It could be argued that the author ought to
be in the Description or About, but if front-ends in the future want to
enable users to sort the books in their library by author, title,
subject, etc., then there needs to be a field for that. It also
facilitates bibliographic citation for students and scholars. The more
books are added, the more important this becomes. And it also ought to
be localizable (I'm thinking especially of Chinese authors). A Publisher
field could be useful too, but that usually is given in the About field,
so I wouldn't push for it as long as the full bibliographic information
is there somewhere.
I think an Author field is a great idea. We'll probably also want a
Translator field. I believe Publisher /might/ be covered by one of the
Copyright lines, but I can't check the .conf standard in the Wiki ATM.
I don't think this needs to be localizable. Rather we should just keep
names in a standard form. There are cases where an author's name is
different in different languages, but they are relatively few. More
significant are the case where an author's name is transliterated. We
could do "Author" and "LatnAuthor" fields for the native script form and
Latin transliterated form respectively, but it might be just as sensible
to put the Latin transliteration in parentheses following its native
script form.
I think we should also keep things in standard sorting order of family
name followed by given name.
So, by way of example, considering first a Latin-script name, then a
non-Latin-script name:
Author=Luther, Martin
Author=倪柝聲 (Nee, Watchman)
OR
Author=倪柝聲
LatnAuthor=Nee, Watchman
For multiple authors, we can simply use commas and 'and' (or its
module-locale appropriate translation).
--Chris
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