On Sat, Apr 05, 2003 at 10:07:57PM +0200, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
[Keld Jørn Simonsen]
http://std.dkuug.dk/cultreg/registrations/narrative/nb_NO,_4.5
Det er en beskrivelse av de enkelte paragraffer i dette, og vi kigger på denne beskrivelsen i arbeidsgruppa. Vi er åpne for kommentarer om forbedringer til teksten, som kommer her:
Contents of a Narrative Cultural Specification
The contents of the Narrative Cultural Specification is described in some detail in the following. it builds on information from the POSIX Shell and Utilities standard (ISO/IEC 9945-2) and the Nordic Cultural Requirements on Information Technology Summary Report. Clauses 1 to 6 are related to POSIX and the narrative description should be accompanied by a corresponding POSIX Locale specification. If a POSIX locale is submitted, it is desirable that it be accompanied by a related narrative cultural specification. Clause 7 to 32 are to provide information, which is not presently expressible in POSIX notation. Examples of Narrative Cultural Specifications are given in annex D.
Clause 1: Alphanumeric deterministic ordering
Here the specification of a national standard for ordering should be listed. If there are more standards, or options for a standard, there should be one POSIX specification for each of the standards or options. A European Multilingual Ordering standard such as ENV 13710, or other international standards, already in this registry, could be referenced and possible deviations, if any, could be described. Issues to cover may be: are there any letters that are sorted differently from other languages, are capital letters sorted before small letters, are there a specific ordering of accents, in which order should different scripts be, do some characters sort equally at first and then when the whole string is otherwise considerered equal, should they then be sorted differently at other levels? Does the language require reordering of some characters before collation weighting (e.g. Thai)? Does the language sort on a syllabic basis, rather than merely letter_by_letter (e.g. Burmese)? Does the language make use of ideographs, and if so, how are they handled with respect to other characters? If aspects of the ordering for the language extend beyond what a POSIX specification can handle, then details can be described in Clause 10. This is a POSIX category.
Clause 2: Classification of characters
The POSIX standard allows descriptions of what is alphabetic characters, capital and small letters, digits, hexadecimal digits, punctuation characters, spaces, graphical characters and control characters. This is a POSIX category.
Clause 3: Numeric formatting
Here it is described how numbers are keyed in and formatted, including the format of the decimal point and the thousands separator. This is a POSIX category.
Clause 4: Monetary formatting
Here formatting rules for monetary amounts, as well as local and international currency symbols according to ISO 4217, are described, as well as the relation between the amount, a sign and the currency symbol. This is a POSIX category.
Clause 5: Date and time conventions
Various names for days and months are given, together with formats for writing date and time. Things to consider are: do day and month names start with a capital letter or a small letter? Are there well recognized abbreviations for the day and month names? Is ISO 8601 formatting widespread? As the date formats are for use in POSIX, for example when listing files, consideration should be given to possible POSIX conventions in the culture. This is a POSIX category.
Clause 6: Affirmative and negative answers
Here the short notation for "yes" and "no" answers in the language can be specified. If the culture has strong relations to several languages, for example in a multilingual country, it should be permitted to answer in any of the languages. As English is widely used in many cultures, allowing responses in the English language should be considered. This is a POSIX category.
The rest of the clauses are not directly related to POSIX Locales:
Clause 7: National or cultural Information Technology terminology
Here terminology for a language or culture can be listed, for example a translation of ISO terminology for Information Technologies.
Clause 8: National or cultural profiles of standards
Here profiles of standards can be listed, for example, OSI national profiles, or profiles of the POSIX standards. See the POSIX ISO/IEC 9945-2 standard for an example.
Clause 9: Character set considerations
Here it can be described how characters are used in the culture, for example: - which characters are necessary to write a particular language, - which characters are used to give further precision in the language, - which characters are usually used in newspapers and books for writing of names and places, - which characters are used for historic writing of the language, - and which characters are used for other purposes.
This clause may also be used to specify which coded character sets are common in the culture and what coded character sets are recommended. Also further descriptions of coded character sets may be described; it is also possible to document these in the form of a POSIX Charmap registration.
Clause 10: Sorting and searching rules
This is much like clause 1, but can be used for further descriptions, such as how to split a record into sorting fields, and special words which are ignored when comparing or searching. Also sound based matching rules may be described here. What can be accomplished with POSIX should be described in clause 1.
Clause 11: Transformation of characters
Here transliterations and transformations of characters can be described, for example transliteration rules between Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, or fallback notation for some frequent letters. Also this is the place to write about standards in the culture for character conversion.
Clause 12: Character properties
Here additional considerations further than those given in clause 2 can be given, for example how small letters without a direct capital counterpart may be capitalized, or special capitalization rules.
Clause 13: Use of special characters
Here use of special characters, such as quotation marks, abbreviation marks, and punctuation marks can be described. Also interesting here may be what to avoid, for example number signs, pilcrow sign and division signs are not used in documents in several cultures. Spacing rules and the relation between different punctuation signs is also relevant here.
Clause 14: Character rendition
Special considerations about rendition such as what alternatives may be considered adequate, and acceptable glyphs, may be described in this clause.
Clause 15: Character inputting
A keyboard seldom has separate keys for all the characters needed. This clause is intended for description of keyboard inputting rules and other input methods.
Clause 16: Personal names rules
Personal naming differs from culture to culture, for example what is considered the family name, how titles are used, in which order the familiy name and given name come, and whether given names or initial are used. Also the rules for children inheriting their fathers' and mothers' family name, and what happens for married couples may be described here.
Clause 17: Inflection
Languages vary much with respect to inflection, different forms of words depending of the context. here the rules can be described or referenced. Some common translation APIs today take some aspects of this into account, eg. the UNIX gettext() functions deal with singular/plural forms of nouns.
Clause 18: Hyphenation
Hyphenation rules can be described here, and also references to the specifications for a language may be done here.
Clause 19: Spelling
This clause is for specification of spelling rules and spelling lists, or reference to orthographic documentation.
Clause 20: Numbering, ordinals and measuring systems
Here measurement systems can be described (normally this is the ISO SI system). Use of decimal points and thousands separator should be described in clause 3.
Clause 21: Monetary amounts
Here further considerations to clause 4 can be described, such as old currencies.
Clause 22: Date and time
This is for considerations in excess of clause 5, such as non-POSIX date conventions, time zone names and daylight savings rules, and other written expressions like "half seven" - what is then really meant - 06:30 as in Germany or Denmark, or 07:30 as in Britain?
Clause 23: Coding of national entities
Here coding for different entities can be described, such as postal codes, administrative codes for local government, police districts, abbreviations for cities or provinces, and time zone names relating to different parts of the culture.
Also specifications should be given for identification of the whole culture, for example ISO country codes for a nation.
Clause 24: Telephone numbers
The formatting of telephone numbers, nationally and internationally.
Clause 25: Mail addresses
The formatting of postal addresses, where to put the title of the addressee, the street number and the postal code, what are the names of the storeys, and other conventions used.
Clause 26: Identification of persons and organizations
A culture may have numbering schemes for persons and organizations, for example social security numbers, and general tax numbers for companies, together with registries for different organisation forms such as limited companies and associations. This clause may be used to describe such numbering systems.
Clause 27: Electronic mail addresses
Cultural conventions for Internet and X.400 electronic addresses etc. may be described here.
Clause 28: Payment account numbers
Cultural conventions for bank account numbers can be described here.
Clause 29: Keyboard layout
Here the conventions for keyboard layout may be described.
Clause 30: Man-machine dialogue
Considerations for how to localize products may be described here.
Clause 31: Paper formats
Here it can be described what the conventions are for paper size (normally ISO standards) and the use of window envelopes, etc. Also how punched holes are placed in paper may be relevant here.
Clause 32: Typographical conventions
This clause may be used for how layout is done, for example how to layout a business letter, or a fax. Use of special characters, for example quotation marks, should be described in clause 13.