Re: Units of Measure

[Betty Harvey <ebxml@eccnet.eccnet.com>]

On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, William J. Kammerer wrote:

> I couldn't figure out what John Motley meant by "An X12 message would
> simply be another RENDERING with a different DTD."  What's X12 got to do
> with a hunk of XML data? And wouldn't you ever need just one DTD? Why
> would a DTD have to be rendered at all?  It's data that might be
> rendered with various style sheets (or programs) to display the same
> data with French, Spanish, English, or German labels and legends.  Is
> John talking about rendering a DTD's element names in a different
> language?  If so, I can't see the point of that since only programmers
> would in all likelihood ever look at XML directly, and they deal with
> English labels and commands all day long now in HTML, C++, and Java.
> 

William:

	I must have missed John's posting but I can understand the need
for multi-language tags (this doesn't necessarily mean multi-language
element names).  A worked on a project several years ago where the
information was being created in Swedish.  Originally we were going to
write the DTD in Swedish but decided to write the DTD in English to
make the DTD more 'universal'.  However, since the DTD was originally
intended for use in Sweden it was not fair for information creators
to be required to look at and think of English in their day-to-day
work.  The content creation software allowed us the opportunity to
create psuedo tags.  To the content creators, it looked like they
were working in Swedish but the underlying structures and content
elements were English.

	The ultimate goal is that content creators working with XML
will never have to look at a tag.  This is a lofty goal and is
unreachable in a lot of industries, i.e., insurance, legal, legislation,
medical records, etc.  When real content is needed a human has to
make determinations about the value and legitimacy of that content.

Betty

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Betty Harvey                         | Phone: 410-787-9200 FAX: 9830 
Electronic Commerce Connection, Inc. |        
harvey@eccnet.com                    | Washington,DC SGML/XML Users Grp
URL:  http://www.eccnet.com          | http://www.eccnet.com/xmlug/
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