The W3C Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has posted the third public working draft of
Best Practices for XML Internationalization. "This document provides a set of guidelines for developing XML documents and schemas that are internationalized properly. Following the best practices describes here allow both the developer of XML applications, as well as the author of XML content to create material in different languages." Suggestions include:
- Provide
xml:lang to specify natural language content
- Provide a way to specify text directionality
- Avoid translatable attributes
- Indicate the translatability of elements and attributes
- Provide a way to override translatability information
- Provide text segmentation-related information
- Provide a way to specify ruby text
- Provide a way to specify comments for translators
- Provide a way to specify unique identifiers
- Identify terminology-related elements
- Provide a way to override terminology information
- Use multilingual documents with caution
- Name elements with caution
- Provide ITS rules for your DTD or schema
- Specify the language of the content
- Specify text directionality if needed
- Override translatability information if needed
- Assign unique identifiers to text items when possible
- Use CDATA sections with caution
- Provide comments for translators
- Ensure any inserted text is context-independent
- Use entity references with caution
- Place sub-flow elements with caution
There are also specific suggestions for XHTML, DITA,
and DocBook.
I'm not sure I agree with everything they say.
"Avoid translatable attributes" sounds very questionable to me, though there is a rationale for it.
Feedback is requested,
