XML and Internationalization...

[Mark D. Anderson]

>One important point to note is that by itself, the 'xml:lang'
>attribute simply indicates the language of the content and attribute
>values -- it does not suggest that sibling elements with different
>xml:lang values either are or are not equivalents in other languages.
> [...]

> >     <param id="Nbr" mode="in" type="int">
> >         <description xml:lang ="en">The number to pass in</description>
> >         <description xml:lang ="fr">Le nombre à passer</description>
> >         <description xml:lang ="es">El número a calcular</description>
> >     </param>

Good point. Is there some way this could be done with XLink/XPointer,
whereby string resources could be kept externally, so that one file has this:
 <description xml:link="simple" show="embed" href="http://foo.com/mystrings#Nbr"/>
and another file (or possibly the same file) has the definitions of the string
for the different languages.

Obviously, an xml app could define whatever semantics it likes, but
i'm wondering if there is enough mechanism in the standards to do
it at parse time.

Ideally, xml:link and show could be defaulted, and the href would only
have to have the id ("#Nbr"). a binding from "above" would set xml:lang
and set the base URL for the strings file. XPointer would know to seek
out the lang=fr variant of the pointed-to resource if xml:lang was set
to "fr".

I'm sure all my specifics are screwed up, but hopefully you get the idea.

Next, I want to inline a CDATA english string to act as default if
i don't find a language-specific one externally....

-mda


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