Swiss german, spoken

[Harald Tveit Alvestrand]

--On 13. juni 2005 13:23 -0700 Karen_Broome at spe.sony.com wrote:

> Will a MIME type help me distinguish between Arabic, Devangari, Latin,
> Traditional Chinese, or Simplified Chinese in the XML format?

Nope - but if that's the question, you've already decided that you've got 
written text.....

> Can it be
> used with the xml:lang attribute? That's where I need this data.

I may be at the tail end of a losing battle, but I still haven't bought off 
on the idea that all information containing an information object needs to 
be put into the xml:lang attribute. I've been having this discussion since 
RFC 1766, so it's not a new debate.....

> There is
> often a one-to-many relationship between the spoken language and its
> written variants and these written variants must be described. Nothing I
> do is intended for use in e-mail.

Yep. I think we don't have a disagreement - when I read through the part of 
the debate that was downloaded when I uploaded my comment, it seems that 
the consensus was pretty strong that scripts were properties of text, and 
"written/spoken" was a property of the media.....

                   Harald