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

[Michael MD]

> 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.


wouldn't it be better just to use the standard class names regardless of
what language the human-readable content is written in?

I think it would be good to keep it simple!