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Status: Initial Draft ie. please focus on technical content, rather than wordsmithing at this stage.

Author: Yves Savourel

Naming Scheme

Summary

It should be possible for translation tools to rely on a predictible list of element and attribute names for a given type of documents.

Challenges

Using documents where elements or attributes do not follow a predictible naming pattern may cause problem for translation tools. This is especially true if not all parts of the document are not to be translated. In that case the rules to distinguish the translatable nodes from the non-translatable ones would be difficult to specify.

For example, the following XML excerpt is not conducive to localization because the list of elements cannot be easily codified for translation rules.

<Ok>OK</Ok>
<Cancel>Cancel</Cancel>
<Message001>Cannot open the file.</Message001>

Quick Guidelines

Documents should not use element or attribute names that are generated from identifiers. Instead, one should use an attribute to store the identifier:

<selector id="OK">OK</selector>
<selector id="cancel">Cancel</selector>
<message id="001">Cannot open the file</message>