Language attributes- what are they?

Tex Texin tex at xencraft.com
Sat Jan 1 08:23:26 CET 2005


oy vey.
It's a good point.
I agree with you about the sorting, but I guess in that case we disagree on the
language tag.
It seems to me the document is an Icelandic or English document which contains
some Old Norse text. Alternatively, we can tag the Norse text as Old Norse
separately from the sorted index tagged as Icelandic.

If an author writes for an audience, the content is presumably in the language
of the audience, even if there are elements which are in another language.

If we were talking html, I might tag each list element to reflect the language
of each item (Old Norse), but the overall list would be tagged to provide the
right ordering, numbering, etc. (Icelandic).

<ol lang=[language of the author or audience]>
<li lang=[language of the list element]>...

Tex


John Cowan wrote:
> 
> Tex Texin scripsit:
> 
> > Wouldn't it be surprising for a non-swedish sort order to be used with
> > content that was labeled as Swedish?  (Regardless of who the content
> > is given to...)
> 
> I agree with all of your points except this one.  The difference
> between (normalized) Old Norse text and Modern Icelandic text is
> primarily one of spelling: there's a nice example at the bottom of
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Norse_language, the center and right
> columns.  Nonetheless, I'd expect the sorted index of a modern printing of
> an Old Norse text to use Icelandic order if it's intended for Icelanders
> (thorn after z), and English order if it's intended for anglophones
> (thorn after t).
> 
> --
> The experiences of the past show                John Cowan
> that there has always been a discrepancy        jcowan at reutershealth.com
> between plans and performance.                  http://www.reutershealth.com
>         --Emperor Hirohito, August 1945         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------
Tex Texin   cell: +1 781 789 1898   mailto:Tex at XenCraft.com
Xen Master                          http://www.i18nGuy.com
                         
XenCraft		            http://www.XenCraft.com
Making e-Business Work Around the World
-------------------------------------------------------------



More information about the Ietf-languages mailing list