Comments on Conformance section (part 1)

Hi Felix, Christian, all

Here are some comments on part of the Conformance section
(http://www.w3.org/International/its/itstagset/itstagset.html#conformance)


===1: First paragraph of section 4.1.
"They don't concern" should be "They do not concern".


===2: Clause 1-1:
"(e.g. the head element in HTML)." Maybe XHTML instead of HTML?


===3: Clause 1-2:
"All data category attributes must be declared at all elements which are part of the existing or new schema."

A) The link of "data category attributes" seems to be broken (in all occurences)

B) I'm not sure what "data category attributes" are. It sounds like something such as its:locInfoPointer would be such thing, but
that is an attribute not used locally. I understand this means all ITS attributes one can use locally. Maybe there is a way to
articulate this better?

C) It seems too much to force *all* data categories to be declared.

D) I would disagree with forcing to put ITS attributes in *all* elements. This for several reasons:

	D.1) It's OK most of the time for the article-type XML documents (DITA, DocBook, XHTML, etc.) but it makes less sense in
many of the resource/data-oriented XML documents, where large sets of elements may have nothing to do ever with text data.

	D.2) It makes no sense for some of the data category when the elements are empty... For example allowing almost any ITS in
XHTML <br/> is meaningless: <br its:term='yes'/> means nothing, why forcing that to be valid?

	D.3) Some data categories may be already defined in the host format (like translate in DITA, or bidi and ruby in XHTML). It
would probably be not a good idea to encourage using ITS markup over the native one.

So it may be *convenient* (in some cases) to declare them on all elements, but one should not have to to be conform.


E) I would replace "part of the existing or new schema." by "part of the schema.". 'existing or new' does not add anything to this
clause, and the paragraph "Who uses this product" covers this 'existing or new' aspect for all clauses.


===4: Clause 1-3:
"The ruby element must be declared as an inline element (the definition of inline depends on the existing or new schema.)"

A) This look a bit strange. Its says basically: "The ruby element must be declared as a specific type of element, and you will know
what that specific type of element is depending on your schema." If we don't say what an inline element is exactly we might as well
not say anything.
Maybe something like: "The ruby element must be declared in elements that have text content." or something better?


===5: Clause 1-4:
"The span element may be declared as an inline element (the definition of inline depends on the existing or new schema.)."

A) Same as for clause 1-3.


===6: Clause 1-5:
"The declarations of general datatypes should be taken into account."

A) The link to "declarations of general datatypes" is broken. So I have no idea what it means exactly :)


===7: Paragraph 2 after the clauses:

"Since the definitions in are ...": "in" what?

"It depends on the design of the existing or new schema (e.g. whether it already has a customization layer which uses parameter
entities) what is appropriate." sounds strange to me.

Maybe, instead:

"The appropriate steps to integrate ITS into a schema depend on the design of this schema (e.g. whether it already has a
customization layer which uses parameter entities)."

And for the part: "The ITS schemas in the format of XML DTD, XML Schema and RELAX NG in Appendix A: Schemas for ITS are only
informative examples, it is not not feasible to integrate them into every existing or new schema."

I would drop ", it is not not feasible to integrate them into every existing or new schema". Beacuase it does not really add any
usefull information.

...and there is the discussion about whether the schema are normative or not obvioulsy...


===8: Last paragraph of section 4.1:

I would drop: "ITS markup declarations are a set of elements and attributes, that have been designed using state of the art
knowledge about internationalization and localization needs.". It sounds very pretencious :)

I would drop: "Since the goal of the ITS Working Group is to deliver one set of declarations, the conformance levels defined in this
section do not allow an existing or new schema to use only parts of the ITS markup declarations. However, this concerns only the ITS
markup declarations in a schema." Since I don't agree that all data categories must be permited to have a conformant ITS markup.

I would probably drop: "As for the interpretation of ITS markup and the respective data categories, the product and conformance
criteria defined in Section 4.2: Conformance Type 2: Processing Expectations for ITS Markup are relevant." Because the next section
is just after. I guess that could saty for a transition (but it's a specification not a dissertation, do we have to have
transitions? :)


That's all for now.
-yves

Received on Friday, 31 March 2006 20:54:51 UTC