XML Schema and international Booleans

[Rick Jelliffe]

 From: Anders W. Tell <anderst at toolsmiths.se>

 >Does this mean that I cannot create sub types of boolean which allows
>other languages  than English?

I think the XML Schema WG is working under the rationale that the only
reliable approach is to standardize only a single way to do any one
thing. So there are only Gregorian dates using ISO 8601, and there is
only one form of ISO8601 used, for example.

There has been a lot of debate about this between the W3C
internationalization group, of course.  The issue comes down to whether
to provide localization or internationalization.  I think, for XML
schema, the non-localized approach (which is code for "English"--how
shocking)  can be justified.

Since, I think, XML Schemas is fundamentally intended for systems with
something like Java at one end and something like SQL at the other, the
reasons for localization are perhaps less than otherwise.  I think there
is an assumption that input will go through something like a complex
forms mechanism and output will go through something like XSL.

For controlled vocabularies, I suspect the better way to handle them is
to have a Swedish->English  XSL script on the client.  There are
thousands of languages, and I don't think it is reasonable to expect
implementers to implement them.  And it is dangerous to have standards
made using words that the editors could not read.

I am sure any ideas are welcome.  One approach would be to allow the
schema developer to put in aliases for keywords.  Another approach would
be to define entities &sant; and &falskt;  but then you would also need
a DTD. Oops.

Rick Jelliffe



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