OASIS Open

New Context Services, Inc.

No

While I am personally in favor of making the `lang` property mandatory, in light of the fact that making it mandatory would almost certainly result in the introduction of an `undef` value in the `lang` vocabulary, I am voting to make the `lang` property optional.

Given a choice between:

a) Implementers being forced to put a `lang` field on their data against their will, choosing to set it to `undef`, and thereby putting a bunch of garbage data out there which cannot be translated.

b) Allowing *smart* implementers to populate the `lang` property in a meaningful way, which *does* facilitate translation.

I choose b.

In the long-run, I believe that market forces will encourage folks to do the right thing and will punish those who harbor fantasies that i18n is unimportant to information-sharing.