My comments on appropriate use of Natural Language Override are imbedded
in your (excerpted) note below.
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (outside consultant at Xerox)
High North Inc
906-494-2434
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>[Note - I reformatted your paragraphs for legibility]
>
>From: Carl Kugler <kugler@us.ibm.com>
>To: <ipp@pwg.org>
>Subject: IPP> MOD OLD NEW Issue: Contradictory NLO requirements
>Date: Wed, 7 Oct 1998 16:43:19 PDT
>
>While we're on the subject of natural languages, here is a rerun from
>May. Bear with me on this one; it's hard to digest. I found it hard to
>follow myself, after four months!
>
>Original message: http://www.egroups.com/list/ipp/3641.html
>
>Re: IPP> MOD> Another IPP 1.0 issue
>By Carl Kugler @us.ibm.com
>Friday May 29, 1998 11:42 AM PST
>
>I think this text from MOD section 3.1.4.1 is misleading:
>
>[snip...]
>
>Somewhat related question: is it ALLOWABLE for an IPP object to use the
>Natural Language Override mechanism in cases where it is NOT necessary
>(i.e., would be redundant with a default specified by a Job object's
>"attributes-natural-language" value or the "attributes-natural-language"
>operation attribute of the response)?
>
>[I think we're now saying yes, which implies that 3.1.4.1, while
>misleading, is technically not incorrect. It just calls for more NLO
>overrides than necessary.]
>
IEM - I believe it should always be permissible to insert an (otherwise
redundant) NLO in a response or in the internal representation of the
job's attribute on a server (ie, an IPP Printer object).
>
>P.S. Does it really need to be this complicated? Of what utility is
>this NLO anyway? It has no use on the server side. The only use I can
>think of at all is in choosing an orientation for rendering text for
>individual attributes on a GUI. I'd be impressed to see a GUI that can
>render a group of attributes with some sideways and some up-and-down,
>and still make sense!
>
IEM - One use for NLO is an operator writing 'job-message-from-operator'
on an existing queued job in a language OTHER than the language than the
job was submitted with. Another use is for site-administered media names
(eg, defined by the site SA in French, when submitting a job in German).
Another use is for correctly specifying 'requesting-user-name' in the
language of the job creator, even if the job (for site-specific reasons)
is being submitted in another language (eg, all the key operators speak
French and the office is in Zurich, but the job submitter is Swedish).
The W3C is now requiring explicit language tagging in most of their new
standards work and the IETF (in RFC 2277, Policy on Charsets and
Languages) strongly recommends language tagging in all new protocols,
because speech synthesis (eg, screen reader software) REQUIRES language
tags to correctly 'read' text. This feature is useful for people using
limited mobile interfaces and for people in hostile environments (such as
factories). It's obviously necessary for access by blind people.
With respect to your remark about text with both horizontal and vertical
elements (in a GUI or other WYSIWIG interface), actually the Unicode
Consortium (which has already published an excellent bi-directional
algorithm for right-to-left Arabic text mixed with left-to-right text)
is working on the problem of shifting between horizontal and vertical in
the rendering of CJKV (Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Vietname) ideographs.
They like hard problems...
>
> -Carl
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------