Re: Input to Best Practice 18: Assign unique identifiers to text items when possible

Hi Yves,

Many thanks for your reply, and apologies for the delay in replying, but 
things have been very hectic of late. I hope I do not sound like some 
boorish flame perpetrator, but I passionately believe that we are 
omitting some very important BP information here:

Yves Savourel wrote:
> Hi Andrzej,
>
>   
>> Sorry for what might appear to be repetition of my previous post 
>> on this topic. Is it not possible to mention xml:tm as a viable 
>> way of achieving unique text identifiers.
>>     
>
> I'm afraid this would be too specific to point at xml:tm id system. BP 18 aims at a very general practice. xml:tm id system is very
> specific and has a lot of constraints that simply do not apply to many XML structures. It's tailored for xml:tm and fill the BP 18
> requirements, but I fear that using it as an example would be a bit confusing for readers. They would have to understand what xml:tm
> structure does over the host format structure to understand the id scheme; and that would take some effort to convey clearly and
> concisely in an example. Also xml:tm is a specialized multilingual format, that is not one of the 'source' format we use generally.
> I have nothing against xml:tm, but I honestly think it would not help here.
>
>
>   
I am a little confused by your response here. xml:tm is a LISA OSCAR 
standard that enables the unique identification of all of the 
translatable elements (including translatable attributes) of an XML 
document. As such it meets the requirements of BP 18 exactly.

xml:tm is also intrinsically linked to W3C ITS as it allows the mapping 
of W3C ITS document rules directly onto a given XML vocabulary. It takes 
into account all aspects of document rules, including within text 
elements, subflows and translatable attributes and interprets these via 
the xml:tm namespace onto the specific vocabulary.

xml:tm is not a specialized multilingual format, it is monolingual (one 
document object per language), with great emphasis placed on the source 
language (author memory).

xml:tm is a namespace interpretation of W3C ITS document rules for a 
given XML vocabulary. Think of it as an XML namespace implementation of 
W3C ITS document rules - the direct mapping of W3C ITS onto a document, 
which at the same time provides a unique was of indexing all text 
elements of that document right down to a sentence level of granularity.

Without xml:tm there is no way to uniquely identify translatable 
attributes and individual sentences.
>> xml:tm is the only standard to date that references W3C ITS directly 
>> (in fact W3C ITS is mandated by xml:tm), and is most likely to be the
>> main way in which the W3C ITS is actually used and implemented. 
>>     
>
> It's is great that xml:tm mandates ITS. But I hope ITS will not be limited to integration with other standards, and to be used on
> its own. I certainly expect many translation or language-processing tools to make use of it: WorldServer-9 has some support for it
> already, Heartsome tools list it for version 7, etc.
>
>
>   
Heartsome tools implement ITS via xml:tm. I worked closely with them on 
this. Obviously XML-INTL has the first full ITS implementation in its 
XTM product.
>> It might be nice to reciprocate this in BP 18.
>>     
>
> You have too big of a heart Andrzej :) I'm much more cynical and think it would be a bit suspect to to refer to something only to be
> nice because the something refers to you. I certainly hope that xml:tm does not mandate ITS just to be nice to the W3C, but because
> of requirements and technical choices :)
>
>   
You are too kind. xml:tm mandates W3C ITS because it requires the exact 
information provided by ITS for a given XML vocabulary. ITS drives the 
xml:tm namespace implementation. It is a vital part of the standard, 
without which we would have had to invent something in its place. 
Indeed, before the advent of ITS an alternative syntax was considered, 
but abandoned as soon as ITS came on the horizon on the sound basis that 
we would be duplicating another standard.

Best Regards,

AZ

> Cheers,
> -yves
>
>
>   


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