Welcome to the ITS Interest Group

Hello everybody,

First, thank you for taking the steps to participate to this group.

I'm Yves Savourel (ENLASO, Colorado). I will chair the group, and Felix Sasaki (W3C, Japan) is the W3C Team Contact. Please, feel
free to contact us directly if you have questions/comments/etc that you are too shy to post on the mailing list.

I assume that many of you have already an idea of what ITS is, but in case some of you do not, I would recommend you 1) To read the
specification, especially the introduction (http://www.w3.org/TR/its/#introduction) and 2) To ask your questions on this list if
there are specific things that are not clear.

Most of our activities will be done through this mailing list, but we also have some teleconferences, and possibly face-to-face
meetings.


===== What are the main objectives of the group? =====

The complete list is in the Charter (http://www.w3.org/International/its/ig/ITSIGCharter.html), but I'll expand on what I think are
the main aspects:


-1- Help developers to implement ITS, and authors to use it, by answering questions and providing examples.

There are two parts to using ITS: Creating ITS markup and processing ITS markup.

One of our goals is to help authors, schema developers, developers of authoring tools, etc. to create documents with ITS markup, and
to create ITS rules files. While it's usually not too difficult to write ITS, using XPath is not always easy and ITS has some
inheritance mechanisms a bit tricky in some cases. Hopefully we should be able to compile many examples to have a good set of
references after a while.

As far as processing ITS markup: Developing an ITS processor has a few aspects that can be challenging. Some of the people in the
group have implemented ITS processors and can bring their experience; some other have general XML/XSLT/DOM experience that can be
very helpful. The goal is to help each other resolving any issue we run into when implementing ITS, share code if possible, maybe
develop some open-source libraries, basically make the implementation of ITS processors easier for everyone.


-2- Gather requirements for possible additional features or existing feature changes.

When developing ITS, some choices had to be made to drop potential features because of time constraints: we wanted to make sure a
solid base was out without too much wait, and we could add to it if needed later on.

The group will gather the feedback on what seems to be missing, or extra, on what could be improved, etc. As a group we should also
be able to find a common way of implementing a missing features as an extension that may become part of the standard in a next
version of ITS.


-3- Review W3C Working Drafts and emerging specifications from other organizations to help the adoption of ITS 1.0.

The goal here is to look at the new XML formats and applications being done and see how they fare from the viewpoint of
internationalization, with a focus on ITS. We will provide help to the authors to see how ITS can be fitted or mapped to their
markup.

We will collaborate closely with the W3C I18N Core WG for this, as they are the main body responsible for I18N review at the W3C.
Our interest however may go beyond the specifications produced by the W3C and touches on work done elsewhere, for example at OASIS
or other organizations.



===== What is our next step? =====

I think it would be good to have a first teleconference soon, to get a chance to hear each other, and to get some of the activities
started.

So, our first discussion will be: When is a good day/time for teleconferences (at least a first one)?

For this we will need to know where most people are located. So, if you could send me an email with your time zone I will compile a
list and propose several date/time based on that.
(Please, make sure to put something with 'ITS' in the subject so I don't discard accidentally your email as spam (since I don't know
all of your names yet)).

Meanwhile, feel free to also post questions, notes, anything ITS-related, on the mailing list. This is an open (and neutral) forum.



=== Some housekeeping notes ===

- Our IG home web page is here: http://www.w3.org/International/its/ig/.

- And all messages you post on this mailing list are publicly visible in the archives located here:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-i18n-its-ig/


Cheers,
-yves

Received on Tuesday, 1 April 2008 15:02:18 UTC