Follow-up comments from Yves Savourel

[Don Day <dond@us.ibm.com>]

Useful comments from Yves, following up from today's presentation and Q&A
session.

Regards,
--
Don Day
Chair, OASIS DITA Technical Committee
IBM Lead DITA Architect
Email: dond@us.ibm.com
11501 Burnet Rd. MS9033E015, Austin TX 78758
Phone: +1 512-838-8550
T/L: 678-8550

"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"
   --T.S. Eliot
----- Forwarded by Don Day/Austin/IBM on 01/17/2006 12:33 PM -----
                                                                           
             "Yves Savourel"                                               
             <ysavourel@transl                                             
             ate.com>                                                   To 
                                       Don Day/Austin/IBM@IBMUS            
             01/17/2006 11:50                                           cc 
             AM                        "'Richard Ishida'" <ishida@w3.org>, 
                                       "'Felix Sasaki'" <fsasaki@w3.org>,  
                                       "'Lieske, Christian'"               
                                       <christian.lieske@sap.com>          
                                                                   Subject 
                                       Teleconference                      
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           
                                                                           




Hi Don,


Thank you for the opportunity of today's teleconference. It was very
helpful for me.
I've taken several points from the call:


- There is (as far as I can see) no technical issue with the 'translate'
attribute DITA has in place and that ITS planning to use. Some tools may
have difficulty to deal with it, but it's most likely because of potential
tools architecture limitation. For example the way Trados7 is handling
DITA's translate attribute shows such limitation. As a programer myself I
would think the problem is on the tools side, not in the concept. We have
looked at both an XSLT-driven way and a DOM-driven way of working with such
attribute and (so far) did not find show-stopper.


- ITS needs to look at the 'identification of inline vs. non-inline
element' issue. It's in our requirements list but has not been moving very
fast so far.


- We are planning to have 'modularization' sections for various mainstream
formats. In other words, a section on 'how to use ITS with XYZ?' DITA is
slated to be one of the XYZs. We need to make sure we involve the DITA TC
in this (at a minimum its review).


- We need to make sure DITA TC (in a form or another) is in the loop as we
develop ITS techniques/guidelines.


- A more formal liaison would be quite helpful for both sides. Both groups
could benefits from looking at the 'best practices'. I'm not sure how this
can be formalized, Felix is the ITS W3C contact and may be able to help
with that aspect.


- The different roles of ITS and other standards needs to be described in
some kind of white-paper or article. We really need to make a distinction
between ITS (which is on the internationalization side) and things like
XLIFF or Xml:tm (which are on the localization side). They do have
relationships with ITS, but no more or less than other linguistic-related
processes (like between ITS and a term extraction tool, or ITS and a
content display system). Maybe a possible way to illustrate this is to
compare ITS markup with xml:lang (actually if xml:lang did not exists we
would have an its:lang). XLIFF and Xml:tm are useful solutions for specific
parts of the localization process, while ITS, broadly defined, is one of
the parts of the XML content internationalization mechanism.





Thanks again for the occasion to discuss with DITA TC's members.


Kind regards,
-yves