[JDEV] [INFO] i18n? (fwd)

[Eliot Landrum]

Might someone have a more technical / authoritative answer than what I can
give?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 30 Dec 1999 15:32:54 -0500
From: Constantin Riabitsev <tech at nicodemusproject.com>
To: info at jabber.org
Subject: [INFO] i18n?

Hi guys!

Just found out about Jabber, spent all evening looking through the
docs and DTD's and realized that there's no trace of any
internationalization stuff. People communicate in more than one
encoding, and I think it would be wise to incorporate the standard
i18n features into the DTD's. You know, attributes like
charset="koi8-r" or dir="ltr"...

I think they would be appropriate in jabber:iq:info section since
most people don't change their encoding preferences very often, but
just in case I decided to type up a message in an encoding other
than my default one, there should be "charset" and "dir" attributes
defined in the !ATTLIST for <message>.

Example for the jabber:iq:info query-response would be then:

<iq to="user at server.com" type="get">
  <query xmlns="jabber:iq:info"><name/><email/><i18n/></query>
</iq>

<iq from="user at server.com" type="result">
  <query xmlns="jabber:iq:info">
	<name>John Doe</name>
	<email>john at doe.com</email>
	<i18n charset="us-ascii" dir="ltr"/>
  </query>
</iq>

This will tell the client that John Doe uses us-ascii and sends
messages in left-to-right (I think it is safe to provide us-ascii
and ltr as default settings in the DTD:

charset		#IMPLIED	"us-ascii"
dir		#IMPLIED	"ltr"

).

The reason why this is important is because there are sometimes
several typeset standards for some language. E.g. Russian Cyrillic
has two widespread standards -- win1251 (windows platforms) and
koi8-r (*nix platforms) and it is sometimes impossible to use IM
clients between these two unless the client can re-code from one
into another.

Using the i18n parameters, the client will know which encoding the
messages come in and it will be able to recode them (if this
capability is built into it).

Example of an <iq> query reply:

<iq from="user at server.ru" type="result">
  <query xmlns="jabber:iq:info">
	<name>Ivan Petrov</name>
	<email>petrov at server.ru</email>
	<i18n charset="win-1251" dir="ltr"/>
  </query>
</iq>

This will tell my Linux client that before I can understand what
Ivan Petrov writes me, it will need to apply the win1251->koi8-r
recoding routines.

Hope this is useful.. :)
Let me know what you think about this idea.

Sincerely,
-- 
Konstantin Riabitsev,  
Nicodemus Project Tech.
Homines quod volunt credunt.