[tei-council] @xml:lang

[Martin Holmes]

On 13-03-07 05:44 AM, Syd Bauman wrote:
> Oh. As I said, I haven't read the posts that lead up to this, but I
> had (perhaps completely incorrectly) been presuming that the choice
> was between changing decls so that either
>
> a) attribute xml:lang { data.langauge | "" }
> OR
> b) data.language = xsd:language | ""
>
> I.e., not asking whether xml:lang= should allow empty values (of
> course it should), but whether or not the *other* things that are
> declared as data.language should allow empty values, too. (I'll have
> to look and see what I think.)

I've had a look, and I don't think any of them really make sense with an 
empty value, unless we imagine that (for instance), in the context of a 
document which has @xml:lang specified, we might wish to use this:

@targetLang=""

to clarify that the external resource being pointed at is not in the 
same language as the pointing document. But I don't really see how this 
is different from not specifying @targetLang (it is optional), and since 
we don't specify that a document linked by a pointer should be assumed 
to have the same language as the linking document, it doesn't seem 
necessary. Thorts?

Cheers,
Martin

-- 
Martin Holmes
University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre
(mholmes at uvic.ca)