Hi JoAnn, Gershon, Robert and Don,
I see in the DITA TC minutes that you and Gershon are reviewing the W3C XML
I18N Best Practices document with a view to giving them feedback on the DITA
section.
For the record, I submitted the following message to the W3C comment email
(just as an interested party, not in any TC capacity). Please feel free
to use, or not, any of these comments.
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Hi,
A message raised by Paul Grosso on the DITA Technical Committee mailing list
made me go look at the section in the I18N Best Practices on DITA.
I've got a few comments and clarifications to make on the first draft of this
section (28 June 2007).
1. Example 48 (Associating ITS markup to DITA markup) is missing the
"its:" namespace prefix on some of its translateRule elements.
2. Element selectors throughout the DITA section are written
//ph
which doesn't allow for DITA specialization. DITA uses selectors like
//*[contains(@class, ' topic/ph ')]
(note the spaces inside the string) to identify elements according to their
base type. I understand that ITS can handle such selectors, so they
should be used here to conform to DITA rules for specialization. It also
means that specialized elements like b, i, userinput, ... don't need to be
given explicit rules, because they all inherit the translatability of their
ancestor class.
3. This one is a consequence of the fact that its:rules doesn't have inclusion
mechanisms apart from a single xlink:href attribute: DITA domain
specializations are sort of "mix-in" additions to the content model,
but without the ability to include multiple sets of rules, there doesn't seem
to be a way to modularize rules so that each domain knows only its own
translateRules. I don't know that there is a solution to this, but the
shortcoming is probably worth mentioning, because DITA people are used to this
kind of encapsulation.
--
Deborah Pickett
Information Architect, Moldflow Corporation, Melbourne
Deborah_Pickett@moldflow.com