Re: [Ltru] xml:lang syntax

[Felix Sasaki <fsasaki at w3.org>]

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Doug Ewell wrote:
>
>   
>> A language tag denotes one language.
>>     
>
> For suitable values for "one" and "language", yes.
>
>   
>> A protocol may define ways to
>> combine multiple language tags into one field, as HTTP has done with
>> Accept-Language by separating the tags with semicolons.  But that is
>> defined by and specific to the protocol.
>>     
>
> In the XML context, which is what the discussion is about, there is 
> normally no need to consider the possibility of referring to several 
> languages in one xml:lang attribute. The reason is that for 
> mixed-language content, XML lets (and even encourages, so to say) you to 
> use nested markup so that you can say exactly, for example, which parts 
> of the text are in English and which are in French. This may require 
> additional markup elements for the sole purpose of attaching xml:lang to 
> some piece of text, but that's nothing odd. For a truly bilingual 
> element (with almost equal amounts of text in two languages), you just 
> need to select one language for it and override the language information 
> in nested elements.
>
> However, XML has no way to specify different languages for different 
> _attributes_ of an element. If an element's attribute is in language 
> other than than its content, you can use the workaround of an inner 
> element, just for specifying the language of content, but this won't 
> work for attributes in different languages. The problem is real because 
> nowadays people often put textual data in attributes, as opposite to 
> (what I see as) the original idea in generalized markup where attributes 
> seldom contain text in a human language.
>   

The ITS "Language data category" provides a solutions for this. see
http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#EX-devlang-1
for an example of its usage. The problem you are mentioned could be 
solved like this:
<!-- Document is in English, @info is in German -->
<doc xml:lang="en" info="Information fuer den Uebersetzer">
...
<its:langRule  selector="/doc/@info" langPointer="'de'"/>
</doc>
(note that this usage is not 100% the intention of its:langRule, which 
is meant to point to existing values which are represented not via 
xml:lang, and pointing to them via langPointer . However, using the 
XPath expression 'de' as the value of langPointer will do the job for you.

Felix

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