[Comment on ITS WD] Loc Info or Loc Note

Comment from the i18n review of:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-its-20060518/

Comment 12
At http://www.w3.org/International/reviews/0606-its/
Editorial/substantive: S
Owner: RI

Location in reviewed document:
6.3.2

Comment: 
Is there any reason that locInfo is not called locNote - since that is much more true to the meaning.


FS: The naming relies on the name of the data category. I don't think that your proposal "locNote" is appropriate, since providing notes is *one* usage of this data category. See a different usage described at http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Member/member-i18n-its/2006AprJun/0107 ( issue 4, "With the localization information data type"), which (possibly automatically) uses "localization information" for adding linking information between different translation versions. Such links are certainly no "notes" and have a different status than e.g. locn-note in the XMLSPEC i18n DTD, see example 20 at http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#xmlspec . 


I18n: We think there is a serious risk of diluting the meaning of locInfo here to the point that a translation tool, for example, doesn't know what to do with the information pointed to. Pointing to previous translations should be another data category in ITS v2, since the translation tool may well need to do different things with this type of information. That's exactly why I wanted to change the name of the data category - because localization information is too broad a category to describe exactly what this is about. We need to be more specific. Note that the requirements document [1] refers to this specifically as Localization Notes. (If you are going to argue for consistency with that document in comment 6, you should take it into account here, too. ;-)


So the key issue here is what exactly is the scope of the locInfo data category. We feel it should be kept specifically to providing notes to translators, and other similar mechanisms such as pointing to former translations, should be considered more carefully in version2, when they may well be best implemented as a different data category altogether.


[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-itsreq-20060518/#locnotes [http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/WD-itsreq-20060518/#locnotes]


We are raising the status of this comment to S.

Received on Tuesday, 11 July 2006 19:22:28 UTC