RE: [xliff] Re: XLIFF 1.1 Specification Working Draft 14 - RC5

[Mark Levins <mark_levins@ie.ibm.com>]

Hi John,

I fully agree with your mail, it describes
the usage we originally came up with, which in essence means that 'id'
attributes are for the general purpose of linking information to a skeletal
data while 'rid' attributes are used to refer related information within
an XLIFF document.

Regards,

Mark Levins

IBM Software Group, Dublin Software Laboratory, Airways Industrial Estate, Cloghran, Dublin 17, Ireland.

Phone: +353 1 704 6676 IBM Tie Line 166676

"John Reid" <JREID@novell.com>

07/05/2003 23:36

To	<ddomeny@ektron.com>, "<", <ysavourel@translate.com>
cc
Subject	RE: [xliff] Re: XLIFF 1.1 Specification Working Draft 14 - RC5

Hi Doug, Yves, et al,
 
Doug Domeny wrote:
>Replace "These paired elements are related via
their rid attributes" (occurs
>5 times) with:
>
>These paired elements are matched by setting their
id attributes to the same
>value. For example, <bx id="34"/> ... <ex id="34"/>
I think we are imposing a method on the XLIFF filters
and a format on the skeletons with this change. Suppose we have a file
format with the following text:
 
{This is translatable text which is {/weight=+w1}bold,
{/weight=+w3} italic and bold{/weight=-w1}, and italic.{/weight=-w3}}
 
Here the codes are allowed to overlap. I've used bold
and italic for simplicity but this could be complicated with more complex
codes. The filter assigns each code a separate id because without a lookup
table of some sort the filter doesn't know that /weight=+w1 means 'bold'.
It does recognize that weight=+w1 and weight=-w1 are paired. Also, the
developer of the filter did not want to regenerate codes that could as
easily be stored. Thus, the skeleton for this text may look as follows:
 
{#TU id=18#
  #CODE id=19#{/weight=-w1}
  #CODE id=20#{/weight=+w3}
  #CODE id=21#{/weight=-w1}
  #CODE id=22#{//weight=-w3}
}
 
The <trans-unit> appears as follows:
 
<trans-unit id = "18">
  <source>This is translatable text which is
<bx id="19" rid="1"/>bold, <bx id="20"
rid="2"/>italic and bold<ex id="21" rid="1"/>,
and italic<ex id="22" rid="2"/>.
  </source>
</trans-unit>
 
Thus, the id attribute relates the codes in the skeleton
to the inline elements in the XLIFF. The rid attribute relates the paired
codes to each other.
 
If the id must match between the the paired codes, the
skeleton wouldn't store the end codes and the postprocessor must generate
those.
 
This is why I think that the paired codes, <bx/>+<ex/>
and <bpt>+<ept>, should be related via the rid attribute. This
gives the greatest freedom to the filter writers.
 
--john