[I18N] Integrating the W3C ITS locNote into DITA: Options

[Eliot Kimber <ekimber@rsicms.com>]

Per the discussion on today's con call about integrating the ITS locNote
element and/or attribute into DITA, I think the available options are:

1. Use a specialization of foreign to hold the ITS elements as-is. This
would provide full support for all of ITS markup at the cost of an
additional level of wrapping, e.g.:

<itsMarkup>
  <its:locNote>...</its:locNote>
</itsMarkup>

2. Use <data> where the @name value is the ITS tag or attribute name:

<data name="its:locNote">This is a localization node</data>

This can be done today but has more syntantic distance from the real ITS
markup. An obvious enhancement would be to create a domain that specializes
from <data>, e.g. <its_locNote name="its:locNote">.

This also raises the potential of introducing a commenting framework that
would be parallel to <draft-comment>.

3. Allow at least the @its:locNote attribute as global attributes on all
DITA elements. 

This would be easy to implement and would directly reflect part of the ITS
markup. Because it's attributes it wouldn't affect any content models but
would add a new namespace declaration, e.g.:

<topic xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its:>
  ...
  <p its:locNote="This is a localization note">...
  ...
</topic>

4. Define conventions and, ideally, a specialization of <draft-comment> for
capturing localization notes:

<draft-comment outputclass="its:locNote">This is a localization
note</draft-comment>

Which could be specialized to:

<its_locNote>This is a localization note</its_locNote>

Note that we have a pending 1.3 enhancement to allow draft-comment in more
contexts.

5. Allow ITS elements directly. This would both break precendent of not
having any non-DITA-defined elements directly-allowed and would be a major
change to content models.

Cheers,

E.

-- 
Eliot Kimber
Senior Solutions Architect, RSI Content Solutions
"Bringing Strategy, Content, and Technology Together"
Main: 512.554.9368
www.rsicms.com
www.rsuitecms.com
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http://xmlpress.net/publications/dita/practitioners-1/