Re: [office] Proposal for language tags according to RFC 4646

[Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg <Michael.Brauer@Sun.COM>]

Hi,

Eike Rathke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Michael Brauer already mentioned there are proposals to come, so here is
> my proposal to enable support of any language/dialect/variant in any
> script type in any region.
> 
> Currently, ODF sections 15.4.23 and 15.4.24 specify the fo:language and
> fo:country attributes for style-text-properties-attlist. They refer the
> W3C Extendible Stylesheet Language
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/slice7.html#country which in
> turn also separated language/country but refers RFC 3066 [see
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3066.html ] language tags where the
> combined strings of those language tags don't necessarily result in
> a language-country pair, but a sequence of primary-subtag and possibly
> empty subtag(s) instead.
> 
> Similar to the style's fo:language and fo:country at least the following
> are affected:
> 
> - "3.1.15 Language", the metadata <dc:language> element
> 
> - "7.8.1 Alphabetical Index Source", the fo:language and fo:country of
>   text-alphabetical-index-source-attrs
> 
> - "8.6.5 Sort", table:language and table:country of table-sort-attlist
> 
> - "14.7.2 Currency Style", number:language and number:country of
>   number-currency-symbol-attlist
> 
> - "14.7.9 Common Data Style Attributes", number:language and
>   number:country of common-data-style-attlist
> 
> - "14.9.3 Bibliography Configuration", fo:language and fo:country of
>   text-bibliography-configuration-attlist
> 
> The current ODF specification is not sufficient as it doesn't allow
> script types nor dialects nor variants. A short term solution for script
> types could be to "inherit" the XSL script property
> http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/slice7.html#script but then
> again that would not help for variants and may limit us on a long term.
> 
> When referring the XSL 1.0 language property for language attributes and
> strictly interpreting it according to RFC 3066 we would be formally
> bound to the language tags registered with IANA and ISO 639-1 and 639-2
> codes, not even the upcoming ISO 639-3, now FDIS, would be possible.
> Strictly spoken. OOo already supports languages that are covered by
> ISO/FDIS 639-3 only.
> 
> 
> I herewith propose full support of RFC 4646 language tags
> http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4646 that obsoletes RFC 3066.
> 
> language ["-" script] ["-" region] *("-" variant) *("-" extension) ["-" privateuse]
> 
> 
> The question now is how to do it in the schema. We could add script
> attributes similar to language and country, as in
> 
> <optional>
>   <attribute name="fo:script">
>     <ref name="scriptCode"/>
>   </attribute>
> </optional>
> 
> and the same for privateuse, but how to specify the
> zero-or-more-occurrences of variant and extension?

Since we started using the XSL-FO concept, I think it's reasonable to 
continue with that. This also ensures compatibility with ODF 1.1 
applications, that would use all language/country information when 
reading an ODF 1.2 file if we switch to a single RFC 4646 attribute now.

I'v checked XSL 1.1, which is a proposed recommendation, and it only has 
language, country and script, too. We could take the script attribute 
from there, and could add a single attribute from our own namespaces 
that contains the

[region] *("-" variant) *("-" extension) ["-" privateuse]

fragment of RFC 4646.


Best regards

Michael