Here comes the Yiddish

[Martin Duerst]

At 11:30 02/12/04 +0000, Michael Everson wrote:
>At 11:07 +0000 2002-12-04, Jon Hanna wrote:
>
>>The problem isn't that 'one could conceivably express "Portuguese written in
>>the Arabic script"'. The problem is that currently, without registration,
>>one cannot. Yiddish in Hebrew, Yiddish in Roman, Portuguese in Arabic and
>>Old Irish in Ogham (one I'd personally like to see) should become encodable
>>in one fell swoop.
>
>This is what <script="Ogam"> tags are for. This is what ISO 15924 is for. 
>I don't understand why this isn't clear.

I think as an editor of iso 15924, you can of course express your preference
of how script codes will be used. But I think it's a bad idea to try and
force a specific use.

People will use them the way they think they work best. If somebody
thinks they need <foo script='ogam'>, they can use that in their own
XML dtds/schemas. But I guess very few people will do that.
If people want to use that in places such as the http
Accept-Language header or xml:lang, or in some standardized XML
applications such as XHTML, XForms, SVG, SMIL, and so on, they
would have to convince the relevant community (IETF or W3C) that
this is a good thing. My guess is that you will have a very, very
hard time. Given that a script distinction is very rarely needed,
and given the difficulties we already have with existing mechanisms
(how many documents on the web e.g. use xml:lang?) creating new
headers/tags/attributes is just not the way to go.

Regards,    Martin.