Subject: RE: [Ltru] Re: Language in XML Schema 1.1 Datatypes

From: Misha Wolf <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 11:15:44 +0000

So should we be responding re case-sensitivity?

And as the boilerplate text will keep appearing in W3C 
specs, should we tweak it?

Misha

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: 18 January 2006 20:43
To: Misha Wolf
Cc: [email-masked]
Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: Language in XML Schema 1.1 Datatypes

Misha Wolf scripsit:

> [Definition:] language represents formal natural language 
> identifiers, as defined by [RFC 3066]or its successor(s) in the 
> IETF Standards Track.

Technically, no.  But the intent is clear enough.  I myself introduced
this "standards track" language into the XML Recommendation (from which
this language is taken) when I didn't understand the IETF process that
well.
I think, however, that it is of no real importance; whatever the
official
status, in practice 1766 > 3066 > 3066bis.

What troubles me more is that the draft says that the WXS datatype
"language"
is case-sensitive, and says that it's up to applications to provide case
sensitivity.  It seems that this is the result of a misunderstanding:
mn is one thing (language subtag) and MN is another (country subtag),
but of course "MN" as a tag means the same as "mn", since country
subtags
cannot appear in initial position.

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From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2006 13:05:38 +0100

> So should we be responding re case-sensitivity?

I read the boilerplate spec as saying "IETF says this is case insensitive, 
but XML doesn't have a mechanism to formally declare an attribute value 
case insensitive, so you have to do this at the application level". If 
that's so, there's not that much we can do to improve it.

XML experts will surely contradict me if I misunderstood....

> specs, should we tweak it?

no opinion....

---

From: Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 22 Jan 2006 18:43:19 +0900

<[email-masked]> wrote:
 >I read the boilerplate spec as saying "IETF says this is case 
insensitive, but XML doesn't have a mechanism to formally declare an 
attribute value case insensitive,

Correct.

 >so you have to do this at the application level". If that's so, there's 
not that much we can do to improve it.

Well, we are talking about XML Schema, not XML. XML Schema has
something called a post-validation infoset, a formal description
of the result of the validation with XML Schema. We could ask
that the XML Schema WG defines that the case-normalized
(we would have to say how exactly normalized) value of a
language tag is available somehow in the post-validation infoset.

Regards,    Martin.

---

From: Harald Tveit Alvestrand <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 06:09:28 -0800

> language tag is available somehow in the post-validation infoset.

It's probably too much effort to ask that it be 639-cased (en-EN), so 
having a lowercase variant available in the post-validation dataset would 
suit me.
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From: "Felix Sasaki" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 23:15:54 +0900

On Sun, 22 Jan 2006 18:43:19 +0900, Martin Duerst <[email-masked]>  
wrote:

>  >so you have to do this at the application level". If that's so,  
> there's not that much we can do to improve it.
>

I am wondering whether this concerns only the infoset. I could imagine to  
define a data type with RELAX NG, which is "case normalized". RELAX NG  
uses the XML Schema datatypes, but does not create an post-validation  
infoset.

Regards, Felix.

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Jan 2006 11:16:41 -0500

> uses the XML Schema datatypes, but does not create an post-validation  

This made me realize what the real problem is with XML Schema as currently
designed.  Imagine a schema for papers to be published by a certain
agency or conference that has multiple working languages.  It might be
reasonable for the root element of such documents to have a required
xml:lang attribute whose value represents, say, English, French, or Russian.
In XML Schema or RELAX NG, one would therefore specify this attribute
as of type "language" and having possible values "en", "fr", and "ru".

Unfortunately, a document with an xml:lang value of "EN" would not pass
validation, even though BCP 47 defines "en" and "EN" as synonymous.
It gets even worse with longer language tags.

This is unfortunate and should be fixed.

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