Language Maps [was RE: [uf-discuss] Microformats vs XML]

[Scott Reynen]

On May 1, 2006, at 3:33 AM, Joe Andrieu wrote:

> All without any requirement of seeing or using English except the one
> reference to hCard in the title of the profile.

And all the HTML.  The problem is that we need a shared language in  
order to communicate, and machines are bad at translation.  At some  
point before parsing, all multi-lingual class names would need to be  
translated to a lingua franca that can be understood by all  
machines.  There is no good place to do this after the server outputs  
a document, but there's no reason it can' t be done before that point  
and work with all existing microformat parsers.  If you want to write  
your microformats in French, write them in French.  You just need to  
translate them into English before presenting them to a machine  
expecting you to speak English.  This translation could be a  
relatively simple server-side XSLT.  But expecting every parser to  
translate every document before parsing it would require a  
distributed translation system accessible by any programming  
language.  If we had that, I expect we'd find better uses for it.

Peace,
Scott