Re: Sync languages - HTML

gra@zeppo.East.Sun.COM (Gary Adams - Sun Microsystems Labs BOS) writes:
>"M.T. Carrasco Benitez" <carrasco@innet.lu> writes:
>>Which technique should be used to help syncronized multilingual parallel
>>texts marked in HTML.
[...]
>> > <P ID=p1 CLASS=alignment          <P ID=p1 CLASS=alignment
>> >    LANG=en_US> ...                    LANG=fr_CA> ...
>
>This example was intended to be two separate documents with the same ID.
>This would be the more typical arrangement for parallel text.

Sorry, my mistake. From the context I didn't catch that you were describing
two separate documents, ie., whether the parallel texts were two linked
documents or a single columnated HTML instance.

>I like this idea of including hierarchical information in the ID, but the
>use of the LANG info in the ID could lead to some confusion.
>It may be necessary in a single multilingual parallel document to explicitly
>declare equivalent sections with some form of Anchor. In other words the
>semantic importance of the alignment is not the matching language, but the
>matching content rendered in a different language.

It seems like a lot of effort creating all those explicit links, even if
done programmatically. In a large text (like your Greek-English New
Testament) I shudder to think about the overhead. Of course, there doesn't
seem to be any other solution available in HTML.

As you mentioned, being forward compatible with XML should certainly be a
goal, and given that the most recent W3C HTML 3.2 DTD still doesn't allow
ID and CLASS on elements (we have to go to the IETF i18n draft for that),
XML may provide some type of implicit LINK construct that makes more sense
than having to explicitly create all those anchors, certainly a selling
point for XML.

Murray

```````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````````
    Murray Altheim, Program Manager
    Spyglass, Inc., Cambridge, Massachusetts
    email: <mailto:murray@spyglass.com>
    http:  <http://www.cm.spyglass.com/murray/murray.html>
           "Give a monkey the tools and he'll eventually build a typewriter."

Received on Tuesday, 14 January 1997 12:46:29 UTC