Having sent the following message to Jane Hunter and dc-international,
I've decided to forward it to dc-general, as it may be of interest to
others.
Misha
[This mail was written using voice recognition software]
---
Jane Hunter <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>The MPEG-7 people want to be able to describe the language of the MPEG-7
>description using:
> - Language Code - code from ISO 639, RFC 1766
> - Country Code - code from ISO 3166
> - Character Set - IANA identifier
RFC 1766 language tags are made up of an ISO 639 language code plus an
optional ISO 3166 country code, eg "en-us", "en-gb", etc.
>Ideally this would be covered using the XML Language identifier:
>http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-lang-tag
The XML Language identifier (xml:lang) uses RFC 1766 language tags.
>But when I read through the XML spec it appears that you can have either the
>2-letter language code or the IANA character set code - not both. Can you
>confirm this and if its correct, why have they done this?
You are confusing two quite different things:
1. Language. Each sentence, or word, or even character, of an XML
document may have a different language, indicated using an xml:lang
attribute, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml#sec-lang-tag
2. Character set encoding. An entire XML document must be encoded the
same way. This is indicated using an encoding declaration, see:
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml.html#NT-EncodingDecl
If the XML document is encoded using UTF-8 or UTF-16 then the
encoding declaration may be omitted.
>Is it possible to
>define all three attributes using xml:lang
No. See above.
> or do we need to define a new
>structure?
No. See above.
If you want more information, you may do any of the following:
- Mail the W3C's public Internationalisation mailing list
([log in to unmask]).
- If you are employed by a member of the W3C, join the W3C's
Internationalisation Interest Group by mailing the W3C I18N IG
Chair, Martin Dürst ([log in to unmask]).
- If you are employed by a member of the W3C, join the W3C's
Internationalisation Working Group by getting your W3C Advisory
Committee representative to mail the W3C I18N WG Chair,
Misha Wolf ([log in to unmask]).
Misha
[This mail was written using voice recognition software]
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