Chris Newman (Chris.Newman@innosoft.com) wrote:
>What about a multi-valued attribute where each value may be in multiple
>languages?
Since Unicode can support multiple languages, can you give an example
where language tagging is necessary *and* there is only plain text
present?
>
>What about an error string sent from the server to a blind user where one
>of the values causing the error is in a different language from the blind
>user's preferred error string language?
Wouldn't an out-of-band language tag handle this?
>
>What about any multilingual descriptive string which a blind user might
>need to hear?
This is true, but seems like a rare case (the multilingual aspect).
Wouldn't sending a phonetic alternate form (suitable for driving a speech
synthesizer) work even better?
>
>What about the example Pete Resnick of Qualcomm recently stated for
>multilingual descriptive text in a personal addressbook on a Macintosh?
It seems like descriptive text would be a good application for rich text,
but if that's not acceptable I guess I don't see why plain Unicode isn't
good enough for this.
>
>Do you think I'd go through the trouble of writing up a detailed proposal
>like MLSF, and writing functional source code in the appendix if I didn't
>think a solution was necessary?
Well, as you yourself said there are political considerations at work
here, so, yes, I thought I would ask if there was a real problem being
solved. I can certainly see that language tagging helps solve some of the
problems you list, but I don't see why those problems can't be solved by
"higher-level protocols". Please note I'm not trying to change your mind,
just trying to understand why you think this is necessary.
David Goldsmith
Architect
International, Text, and Graphics Department
Apple Computer, Inc.
goldsmith@apple.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Tue Jul 10 2001 - 17:20:34 EDT