2009/11/23 Syd Bauman <Syd_Bauman@xxxxxxxxx>:
> My gut instinct is that it is a less than optimal solution to try to
> use namespaces to differentiate natural languages. That's what
> xml:lang= is for, after all.
>
>  <z>
>    <canonical>MD</canonical>
>    <name xml:lang="en">medical doctor</name>
>    <name xml:lang="fr">midecin</name>
>    <name xml:lang="zh-TW">...</name>
>  </z>

I think xml:lang had become another hangover from the days of XML
rendered using CSS, when XLink and XPointer seemed like good ideas
too.

A few years down the line, the usual advice is to avoid xml:lang and
create your own markup (simply @lang for example), or to avoid mixing
languages in the same document all together, splitting them out into
separate documents.

For example, in the above example, you could just have:

<name>medical_doctor</name>

where "medical_doctor" is the key for a lookup into your translations,
which are held in separate files.



--
Andrew Welch
http://andrewjwelch.com
Kernow: http://kernowforsaxon.sf.net/