On Friday, May 14, 2004 3:30 PM, Peter Constable va escriure: >> To me, documents encompassed any style of writings (and was >> broader). For exemple, I believed that writing was invented 6 >> millenaries ago precisely for accounting and trading, *not* with the >> Hamurabi codex or the Egyptian hymns. But it appears I was wrong. > > If you get a clay tablet with some type of inventory on it and encode > it digitally, presumably there are names of things, and numbers, > perhaps also dates. Let's suppose you encode the text into a digital > document. You assign a metadata tag indicating that the "language" > (linguistic variety and writing system) is such-and-such. How would > it be useful to also assign metadata to indicate what the number > format is?
I do not know, I was not thinking about that. I wrote about an electronic document, sorry, file, I might receive containing an order form, and you said documents did not encompass order forms, as I read it. So my example is void. My error was that I was considering "accounting spreadsheet or an order-entry record" as documents, while you do not. And my mistake was based, I think, on a faulty interpretation of the history of writing, as I wrote. Now, the actual content of the clay tablets is irrelevant (I think). >>> If something is going on internal to proprietary software, then >>> there are no rules. >> >> I also missed that the difference between language ids and locale >> ids only mattered when used in public documents in published >> standardized formats, and that private formats or any out-of-band >> tags, persistant or not, are irrelevant here. > > If something is internal to your process, who cares but you what is > happening? I am basicaly an user. My "process" are procedures, the objects they deal with are, among others, electronic documents, sorry, files, a number of them with proprietary formats that I can (partially) decode. And these files do include or refer locale ids and language ids, sometimes named one for the other BTW. My process is very different from yours. And what you see as "internal to your process" is, to me, actually an usable, external, data. See my example, imagining it is a text processing file: deeply inside, I have found the locale id of the sender. Which was an hint, not the real data I would have liked. To be able to have my job done, I sometimes (often, in fact) have to use different softwares. I understood CLDR as being a way to establish a common ground for these softwares to interoperate, the same way the ONLY purpose of Unicode is to allow various softwares to interoperate. And it happens that these datas (locale and language ids), hidden inside the proprietary formats of the files, are the ones that will select the datas to be used. Since I understand that I feel commited to participate to the debate. Now, one can just deface me saying that I am not supposed to look at that, that the users should restrict themselves to the next release of XML. This is equivalent to say, users are not invited to the discussions about the tools they will use, a very common behaviour of the computer people here in Europa, and a behaviour I am very angry against (hence the sarcarms, for which I would apologize). Have a nice week end, folks (I wrote that, because I noticed Satursday is a raging day for this list ;-) while I am disconnected for Internet, and much more quiet this way. There is no sarcasm, it's sincere.) Antoine
