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<!DOCTYPE appendix PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
        "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd">

<appendix lang="en" id="i18n-system-property">

  <appendixinfo>
    <author>
      <firstname>Steve</firstname>
      <surname>Cheng</surname>
      <affiliation>
        <address><email>stevecheng@users.sourceforge.net</email></address>
      </affiliation>
    </author>

    <date>July 14, 2002</date>

    <abstract>
      <para>
        This document proposes a class of XSLT system properties for enabling 
        internationalization of stylesheets (transparent to the user).
      </para>
    </abstract>
    
  </appendixinfo>
    
  <title>XSLT system property for stylesheet internationalization</title>

  <para>
    The following system properties should be made available to stylesheets
    (via the <function>system-property</function> function):

    <variablelist>
      <varlistentry>
        <term>
          <literal role="xml-qname">i18n:message-language</literal>
        </term>

        <listitem>
          <para>
            Specifies the language that the stylesheet should use for user
            messages (i.e. the content of 
            <sgmltag class="element">xsl:message</sgmltag>).
          </para>

          <para>
            The language is named with language identifiers as defined
            by IETF RFC 1766, the same format used by <sgmltag
            class="attribute">xml:lang</sgmltag> <footnote><para>
              The GNU <envar>LANGUAGE</envar> environment variable
              allows the user to specify an ordered list of languages, so that 
              if a translation for the user's first desired language is
              not available, then as a fallback a translation from the
              user's second desired language is used, and so on.
              Although this functionality is nice to have, it can be 
              difficult to implement in XSLT
              stylesheets.</para></footnote>.
          </para>
            
        </listitem>
      </varlistentry>
    </variablelist>
  </para>

  <para>
    The <literal role="xml-nsprefix">i18n</literal> prefix
    refers to the namespace <literal
    role="xml-nsuri">http://docbook2x.sourceforge.net/xsl/i18n</literal>
    <footnote><para>This specification can be changed later to remove the docbook2X
    reference later.</para></footnote>.  Other information pertaining to
    internationalization can also be included in this namespace in
    future revisions of this specification.
  </para>

</appendix>