[dsdl-discuss] Re: The acronym for DSDL Part 7

MURATA Makoto wrote:
> The acronym in the FCD text is indeed CREPDL. But this acronym
> is not used elsewhere. I think that CREPDL and CLDR are
> sufficiently different, but I am not sure if CRDL and CLDR
> are.
>
> Cheers,
>
I would prefer to go to "CharRep" which is an old name for it.

In general, I think that contractions and acronyms are poor practice for
all sorts of reasons.

First, if they have no meaning as words in their own right (e.g. NVDL)
and they are not big enough to be marketed and branded to get some
popular awareness (e.g. HTML, XML, CSS) then they just confuse readers.
We may as well put Chinese characters into English text. DSSSL gives no
indication of its purpose.

Second, there has been such an explosion of schemas and standards using
acronyms or contractions that people's brains already have to cope with
quite a few. And the chances that there are other people using the
contraction are higher.

Third, it is poor for branding. RELAX NG and Schematron are both catchy
and have succeeded (of course, this catchiness may make some people not
take them seriously too.) We have emphasized that DSDL provides thin
layers in order to be more user friendly, but unmemorable contractions
works against this.

Fourth, I think there is an I18n issue. (Explored below)

So I recommend that where possible, all our (new and upcoming standards)
should only be nicknamed with pronouncable names. I would retrofit all
the parts of DSDL as part of this. I would also rebrand DSDL as "ISO
Schemas" as part of the excercise.

I suspect that there may be some i18n benefit in this. In Japan, there
is a history of making syllabic contractions: aircon (airconditioner),
parsocon (PC), etc. There are some countries which love initials (e.g.
Malaysian English, perhaps under an Indian influence) not only in
personal names, but I think we need to move beyond meaningless letters
towards more meaningful nicknames. One approach might be to think "If
we made a new word for this using two Chinese characters, then converted
it back to English, what might it be?" "CharRep" fits into this
approach: I don't know what the best single kanji for :"repertoire"
might be, and it might be different in CJK regions, but I would expect
there would be some ideograph to fit the bill. So having some
syllable-based nickname on this approach might also aid translatability
and adoptability in non-Latin and non-English nations too.

Because the contractions are *not* English but gobbledigook, there is no
reason to favour them just because they are impressive as technicalisms.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

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