[December 14, 1998] Rick Jelliffe (Allette) announced a new project at Academica Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan, which is designed to help the developers of Chinese XML software. The "Chinese XML Now!" Web site hosts a Chinese XML FAQ document, a collection of small XML files for testing XML well-formedness, a "Chinese Numberplate" Logo intended to help Chinese users select appropriate XML software, and other resources. Documents are available in Chinese using various encodings: UTF-8, Big5, and GB 2312. The Chinese XML Now! Web site also contains references to a variety of resources generally useful in the realm of "multilingual" XML.
"Anyone who is doing Chinese XML is welcome to participate. At this early stage in the game, the intent of the site is primarily to provide useful material for Western developers: we want to make it easy for the first generation of XML tools to support Chinese. But as more XML activity grows on this side of the Pacific, we anticipate the site will become primarily targetted to Chinese-language people. Part of this may also involve creating or porting useful utilities. Academia Sinica is the leading Chinese research institution. It has many projects which will require Chinese XML in the near future. "Chinese XML Now!" is a project to help develop XML infrastructure we can use and share."
[February 05, 1999] Rick Jelliffe has provided an update on the "Chinese XML Now!" Web site. home of a project to help developers of Chinese XML Software. "We are pleased to announce a page "XML and SGML Resources" in which we are putting some of the results of our research and development: software, declarations, documentation, tutorials, and technology notes. In the initial offering of this page are: 1) Three SGML declarations for Big5; 2) The article 'Using XSL as a Structure Validation Language'; 3) A new article 'lineDataWrap: An Element Set for Line-Delimited Records,' which describes an element set for handling database 'dumps', e.g., comma-delimited lines (CDL); 4) The accompanying 'lineDataWrap' DTD. In the next week we plan to augment this with: 5) A lines->XML tranformation software based on the lineDataWrap DTD; 6) Updated versions of the 'XMLized' ISO public entity sets; 7) Miscellaneous XML utilities."
References:
More tests up on Web site "Chinese XML Now! - December 14, 1998.
Mailing list: An XML Mailing List in Chinese Language (XML_ZH) has been set up by Jian Luquin (Polo di Didattico di Crema, Universita degli Studi di Milano). To subscribe, send the message 'subscribe xml_zh' in email to majordomo@ml.crema.unimi.it. Postings may be sent to xml_zh@ml.crema.unimi.it. See also the mail archive.
">How can we give you what you need to give us what we need?" [Internationalization]. By Rick Jelliffe (Academia Sinica). Presented at XTech '99. "This paper is a call for a new kind of internationalization process: the focus should be on making life easy for developers. The "Chinese XML Now!" project at Academia Sinica, Taiwan, and XML itself are the examples considered. Non-Western communities should make part of their strategic plan to develop Websites clearly expressing their cultural and linguistic requirements. These requirements should be practical, DTD or code-level requirements. In particular, standards-making bodies should be redirected to this "informational" function, and academic research programs should be structured so the results will be presented in "developer-friendly" ways as well as formal academic fora. The talk provides a checklist for basic level of support for developers, and look at some other developments along the same lines."
Standard Chinese-English Markup Terminology - From: My Shih-syueng Tseng, Academia Sinica. From a list used during the translation of ISO 8879 (SGML)into Chinese, available as CNS 13854.
The XML and SGML Cookbook. Recipes for Structured Information. - Rick Jelliffe's book on XML contains several chapters especially informative for developers interested in the multilingual aspects of XML document encoding and processing.
CJKV Information Processing - Chinese, Japanese, Korean & Vietnamese Computing (Ken Lunde)
