On Thursday, May 13th, 2004 16:40, Peter Constable wrote: > Only that I don't think it's appropriate in general to tag > documents (by which I don't mean an accounting spreadsheet or an > order-entry record) for things like number formatting, and so such > info should not be included in attributes like xml:lang.
I am sorry I had misunderstood the whole discussion then. To me, documents encompassed any style of writings (and was broader). For exemple, I believed that writing was invented 6 millenaries ago precisely for accounting and trading, *not* with the Hamurabi codex or the Egyptian hymns. But it appears I was wrong. > If something is going on internal to proprietary software, then there > are no rules. I also missed that the difference between language ids and locale ids only mattered when used in public documents in published standardized formats, and that private formats or any out-of-band tags, persistant or not, are irrelevant here. So please ignore my points. Of course when we consider only the legal texts where all months shall be in full letters, all quantities spelled twice, one with numbers and the other with letters, and the timezone rules explicitely deferred to some authority, you are very right. And then the example from Mark is just garbage, as many people would see it (replace "garbage" with "unreadable" if you are not happy with that word); so it is not a "document" any more, and this would be discarded as well. So I beg your pardon having abusing your time. Antoine