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RE: PaceItemLang created. (Add xml:lang attribute to atom:entry)


I completely agree with Paul. I was a bit too quick to say
"every atom element should allow xml:lang" because I wasn't
aware of the fact that there are quite a few elements
(rather than attributes) with completely formalized content
only (such as ISO 8601 dates,...).

In many cases, such as title/summary,... it would also
be very helpful to be able to mark up language changes
inside an element, with something like <html:span xml:lang='...'>.
In some cases, such as "Esprit de Corps", it may be a judgement
call whether this is necessary, but in some cases, it can be
very helpful. The same applies for other markup such as inline
links. In some cases, one would like to put out a summary,
but also allow people to use some links directly.

Regards, Martin.

At 14:14 04/06/14 -0700, Paul Hoffman / IMC wrote:

At 1:10 PM -0400 6/14/04, Bob Wyman wrote: 
        Before saying that xml:lang should be supported on *every* element,
it would make sense to ask why this might be a useful thing to do.

Because we can't predict now how people will want to use multi-lingual Atom in the future.

        1. Would it make sense for the atom:title element to have a
different language than the atom:content element?

Yes. The title of an item might be in the language of the intended reader, regardless of whether or not the reader could read the item itself. "[lang=en]Here's an article about frobizing that I found on a French web site."

        2. Would it make sense for atom:copyright to be in some language
different from the language of atom:content?

Yes. "[lang=en]Copyright 2004. No commercial distribution allowed." followed by content in any language. The creator believes that English is more widely-understood than the language in the content.

        3. If a search engine wanted to allow searchers to constrain results
based on language (i.e. I only want stuff in English), should it return
results that have English content but French titles?

Sure, why not? In fact, that might be an interesting search criterion.

        4. In English, at least, we often appropriate phrases from other
languages. For instance, "esprit de corps" is a phrase that apparently
became popular in English during World War One. If an entry, whose content
was in English, had a title of "Esprit de Corps", should the title be marked
as English or as French?

That's up to the content creator. The language tag is meant as a aid to the display device.

        5. What does it mean if an atom:modified element is tagged with an
xml:lang? Don't Atom dates look the same in all languages? The same question
should be asked re: atom:issued, atom:created, atom:id, etc... Does xml:lang
even mean anything on all elements? If not, why support it?

Correct. xml:lang should only be allowed in entries that might be read and interpreted. Dates and number entries should not have it.

        6. Is it really sensible for an atom:author:name to have a language
associated with it?

Yes. It aids display devices that are displaying the name by reading it aloud, possibly to a vision-impared person. This is particularly true for encoding=utf8 and characters from the Han/Kanji/Hanja character range. Names in Japanese and Chinese are often spelled the same but have completely different pronunciations.

--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium