RE: WOFF and extended metadata

On Tuesday, June 08, 2010 10:17 AM Erik van Blokland wrote:
> 
> 4. This group looked at alternative structures of basic key / value
> pairs, following the same localization system the other undisputed
> elements have. There seem to be two competing ideas:
> 	a. allow localized elements for keys and values. Pro: if you're
> translating only a couple of items, you don't have to duplicate the
> whole structure. This follows the way the rest of the data can be
> localized. Con: UA needs to iterate through everything and apply some
> logic.
> 	b. move localization to the top level of the extension block.
> Pro:
> requires no logic in finding the right values for a given language, or
> matching key / value pairs. Con: localised data has to be complete,
> potentially duplicating parts of the data.
> 

In an attempt to move this discussion towards consensus, I would like to express my personal preference for option (b) for the purposes of localization of metadata extensions. Even though it would require duplication of localized entries, we are talking here of duplicating only couple dozen of XML text lines. Considering that the repetitive XML tags will be highly compressed, the increase of the overall metadata size will be minimal. However, this option is much easier to implement and would not require any additional efforts as far as conformance testing is concerned.

The proposed extension mechanism combined with the agreed set of XML elements and the rule that any arbitrary XML content should simply be ignored would create a metadata structure that can be universally applicable for all intent and purposes - we may not be able to achieve 100% perfect solution here but I'd speculate that what we have is already 99.5% perfect. ;-)

Regards,
Vlad

Received on Tuesday, 8 June 2010 18:19:13 UTC