[html4all] Linguistic variants in a single document ?

[Gez Lemon]

Hi Rob,

On 25/09/2007, Robert Burns <rob at robburns.com> wrote:
> I don't think this requires any additional markup. This is something
> that could be handled nicely by a browser without any other markup.
> Especially at the word level it would simply involve substituting
> British spellings for US spellings or vice versa. For some of the
> phrases Phil cited, that might be a bit more complicated, but still
> possible with no markup. A simple checkbox to indicate the user
> wanted spellings in the preferred language would be the only thing
> necessary in terms of user interaction.

I can see how that might work at the word level, but the biggest issue
with catch-all approaches is that they tend to make nonsense of
edge-cases. For example, if a web-page was to state something simple
like,"Americans spell colour as color", the resulting text for an
American would be, "Americans spell color as color", and for a Brit it
would be, "Americans spell colour as colour"; neither sentence makes
sense.

It's difficult to determine intent without a directive to be sure. You
could always use a directive that instructs the user agent to leave
the phrase alone, which might help for some edge-cases, but you're
still back to depending on markup for understanding. Ignoring markup
completely is similar to the idea that a machine can scan an image and
come up with appropriate alternate text in the absence of
author-provided alternate text. A machine could probably recognise key
features from an image, but it's unrealistic to think that a machine
could reliably come up with something concise that makes sense of the
image in the context the author wanted to impart; only an author can
provide that level of information.

Best regards,

Gez


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