XML Schema and international Booleans

Rick Jelliffe ricko at allette.com.au
Fri Nov 12 06:11:06 GMT 1999


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

Rick Jelliffe wrote:

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

> Then I have a hard time to understand why they are using highly
flexible
> value-space, lexical-representation concepts and then don't use them,
as in
> the case of boolean.

The best practical steps you should take are
    1) come up with a little complaint, an alternative proposal and
justification
    2)post this to the comment mailing list at W3C
    3) also, notify the w3c i18n WG that you think the approach is
wrong.
Your comment might be particularly appropriate at this time.

The other thing to consider is that XMl Schemas 1.0 is already looking
late: I would prefer they leave out value renaming until XML Schemas 2.
I think the main purpose of XML Schemas 1.0 should be to provide the
basic datatyping rather than class or subtyping mechanisms, but I think
most people want more from the base-level XML Schema 1.0

 > ISO creates international standards and im pretty sure that
{true,false} is not
> internationally accepted. Using zero (0) and one (1) is certainly more
neutral and
> logical.

No, because 0 and 1 do not carry implications of true or false to many
people.  And 0 and 1 are Western symbols, so they are only slightly more
"international" than "true" and "false". Also, don't forget that O is
used for "approve" and X is used for "disapprove" in some countries, so
some people may expect 0 to mean "true".

> Frankly Im surprised that it appears that Internationalization is not
accepted
> by all parties involved in writing and debating international
standards.

Well, the problem is that localization is not accepted by all!

> And why should I be forced to use english as a norm ? Why not Swedish
> or Esperanto, which is supposed to be the most universal language of
them all.

Have you seen Euorpanto?  It is a fake language made by EC translators:
you can use any word from any European language with any order allowed
in any European language: Ik laugh pour ein solche new language
doloroso.

Rick Jelliffe


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