More comments on WOFF metadata

Comments from my colleague Eric Muller. Apologies if some of this has been debated and resolved; better safe than sorry:

> 1. all the WOFF elements should be in a namespace. This would address the problem raised by Laurence Penney, and is vastly preferable, IMHO, to a doctype declaration (see the philosophy of RELAX NG for the reasons)
> 
> 2. since the intention of the metadata is primarily to be presented to humans, localizability and accessibility seem important.
> 
> 2.1 On the localizability side, I would have expected that an element like <description> would allow multiple <text> elements, each with different lang attributes.
> 
> 2.3 on the accessibility side, because metadata often contain names (e.g. credits/credit/@name), a plain text value is generally not enough. The common practice is to allow structured text, and in particular to support pronunciation and sorting metadata (which would be meta-metadata in this case).
> 
> 3. Once you have a namespace machinery, extensibility is typically provided by allowing elements of a different namespace. This also solves neatly the problem of multiple sources contributing to the extension, without having to install a registry.
> 
> 4. I suspect that the type xsd:NCName is too constraining for lang attributes, which ought to allow BCP47 names.
> 
> 5. Licenses are not just translations of a text in different languages, they are also adaptations to local laws. I think this implies that the url and id attributes should instead be on the various <text> elements inside <license>.

-C

Received on Friday, 19 November 2010 17:47:10 UTC