Re: Sync languages - HTML

On Jan 14,  9:42am, Gary Adams - Sun Microsystems Labs BOS wrote:

> M. T. Carrasco Benitez writes:
>  > Which technique should be used to help syncronized multilingual parallel
>  > texts marked in HTML.

>  > Some suggestions:
>  >  2.1) NAME (in A)
>  >  2.2) ID
>  >  2.3) A new attribute in SPAN

That depends on whether you require the parallel translations to be in
separate documents or the same document.

Having them in the same document makes adding new translations harder
because the last modify date changes even for unchanged existing
translations. This is bad for cacheing. It also makes layout harder.

> If possible the solution should take into account the complete
> "application" of the parallel text. That could mean more than
> just a single markup construct,

Yes

> e.g. The HEAD LINK element may be used to identify the language
> variants of a particular document. The CLASS attribute on an Anchor or
> Paragraph could identify an alignment point with a unique ID to mark
> the common structural elements.
>
>  <P ID=p1 CLASS=alignment          <P ID=p1 CLASS=alignment
>     LANG=en_US> ...                    LANG=fr_CA> ...

My suggestion would be separate parallel documents, each using the
identical structure and liberal use of matching NAME or preferably ID
attributes as described by Gary, to allow browsers to present pairs of
synchronized documents which scroll in lockstep, follow internal
cross-references in lockstep, and so on.

One option is to use

LINK REL=translation TITLE="Egalement disponible en Français"

for example - though again this requires the document containing each
translation to be modified whenever a new translation is added.

Current work on Web Collections and on Manifests - both of which are
resources containing metadata and pointers to multiple documents -
offer a solution; each translation points to the collection/manifest
document which in turn points to all the available translations.

An additional benefit of using manifests is that they can contain digitally
signed assertions about the collection, subsets, or individual documents,
such as

"These documents are official authorized translations of CEN standard xxx
and have equivalent legal status"  or

"This document is a work in progress Greek translation of document y;
it is presently incomplete"  or

"This document was translated into Urdu as a public service; I make no
promises as to quality or accuracy but hope it is useful"




-- 
Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
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