Hi Hussain! First a note:
* Despite the fact that globalization and multiligualism is held in
high esteem by the XML and HTML communities, authoring, including XML
and Web authoring is typically governed more by «the default» than by
what is held in high esteem. What do I mean? I of course mean that the
typical thing is that documents *either* contains no language
information *or* that the language information says e.g. xml:lang="en"
even if the content is – for instance - Russian. (The former is mor
common than the latter.) But even more typical: Authoring tools (such as
the XMLmind editors) develop into perfect products for writing English
language text: When language information is lacking, then, even XMLmind,
spell check in English seems to be the norm ... Hence, English language
authors will probably not feel the same need for improvement ... This is
a general issue. However, my wish is of course that the XMLmind editors
will make a difference in this regard ...
**And hence, let us jump over to my feature wish:**
I have started to learn DITA (yay!). One reason being that I think I
love the basic structure of DITA: a DITA document consists of one or
more topic elements glued together in a assembly document (a map file).
I like this structure because I, somehow, moves my focus from structure
and over to - well - topic ... (By contrast, when using <article>,
<section>, and <h1>/<h2>/<h3>/<h4>/<h5>/<h6> in XHTML5, a lot of mental
energy gets wasted on thinking on the structure.)
However, because the DITA format in general expects one topic element
per file, this obviously means that, with DITA, one ends up creating a
lot of DITA files. Note, though, that my feature wish is not related
spesifically to DITA - this relates to any format that XMLmind can
handle. My feature wish is, of course, colored by the fact that I tend
**not** to use XMLmind editor for English language documents. Hence it
gets tedious when, having created a new document and, starting to type,
the spellchecker begins to mark my non-english text as incorrectly
spelled ... until I fix the issue by inserting xml:lang="nn".
My general wish, thus, is that when I create a new file, the (correct)
language default should be taken care of by the program.
Concretely, this means that I would like the XMLmind editor to
automatically insert **my** default language in the root element. (In
contrast to today, where no lang/xml:lang attribute gets inserted unless
one does it manually - I suspect that some English language authors [see
the note] feel this as one of those many “punishments” that XML
brings ... After wall: Why have to insert an attribute that isn’t
useful anyway ... ? And so on ...) Anyway: To solve this issue, I would
like the settings section of XMLmind to include one (or more) setting(s)
for default language. (Incidently, this seems to be a common feature for
word processors.) And because (for instance) the “XML community” is
ruled by a dramatic fear for changing "the default" (and also dramatic
fear for specifying something that could be wrong - “I do now know,
with 100% certainty, the language of my next document”), I also
suggest that it should be somehow optional to make use of this feature.
(For my part it does not need to be optional - this is just something I
say to make the proposal more “adoptable”.)
Further possible refinement: Whenever one is authoring a “site”
(that is: a collection of documents that belong together, such as for
Docbook or DITA assemblies), then the language information default could
be picked, by the program, from the the assembly file that glues the
document together (so if e.g. the DITA map file says xml:lang="fr",
then, when creating a linked topic file, then that file should also
default to xml:lang="fr"). (For a bunch of HTML files in the same
folder, they, by convention, why not let the language of the index.html
file govern the default language?)
Leif Halvard Silli
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