RE: [xliff] Content of <sub> element

["Magnus Martikainen" <MMartikainen@sdl.com>]

Hi all,

I strongly believe that we should refrain from restricting what textual content can be left empty unless it really does introduce a significant problem. I believe it is almost impossible to foresee all use cases, and introducing such restrictions may cause problems for implementations.

To illustrate this, here are some arbitrary counter-examples for the cases Rodolfo mentions below:

1) A <source> element may contain content that has only tags, but no text. (In case tags need to be localized.)

2) An empty <mrk mtype="seg"> element may appear in the target of a trans-unit if content has been segmented but not yet translated.

3) An empty <internal-file> would be the correct way to represent a file that is empty. (Could be a flag or a placeholder that will be filled with content at a later stage.)

4) An empty <note> may be used as a placeholder location for comments that will be added to the file at a later stage.

Regards,
Magnus

-----Original Message-----
From: Rodolfo M. Raya [mailto:rmraya@maxprograms.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, September 17, 2008 10:00 AM
To: xliff@lists.oasis-open.org
Subject: Re: [xliff] Content of <sub> element

On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:03:30 -0400
"Doug Domeny" <ddomeny@ektron.com> wrote:

> In general, an element that allows text wouldn't require it. The P tag
> in HTML doesn't require text according to the schema, but the spec
> recommends browsers to ignore empty P tags.


According to all replies an empty <source/> element is valid, but I
doubt it can be useful.

“The <mrk> element delimits a section of text that has special meaning”
is written in the specs, but if we allow it to be empty, what would be
delimited?

An empty <internal-file/> element would also be valid if we consider an
“embedded file” as text, but does it make sense?

An empty <note/> without attributes would also be allowed, but it would
be meaningless.

I understand the desire to have similarities with other standards, but
I think that HTML is not a good choice for making comparisons. For
example, an empty <p/> has a meaning, as it is used as vertical
separator.

So, I think that there may be elements which could be left empty,
provided that they are useful due to their attributes. However, I think
that elements like <source> or <mrk> should always have content.

Best regards,
Rodolfo

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