SSML review

Hi,

I did quick scan over SSML 1.1 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/) which is on 
last call till July 20.

Here are my comments about SSML which relate to ITS.

SSML should allow usage of ITS markup, because SSML documents contain 
natural text with speech markup and as such it is very likely that they 
can be translated.

SSML doesn't provide direct support for ITS and has limited 
extensibility which prevents using ITS (see below).

Problem 1:
==========

Section 2.2.3 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/#S2.2.3) 
allows usage of foreign elements inside SSML documents. Thus it is 
legitimate to use elements like its:rules or its:ruby in SSML documents.

However specification doesn't explicitly allow to use foreign 
attributes. This means that it is not possible to use local ITS 
attributes like its:translate.

Solution 1:
===========

SSML should allow foreign attributes on any SSML element. Ideally such 
possibility will not be mentioned only in prose of spec, but also XML 
schema will specify this using xs:anyAttribute (and similarly by xs:any 
for elements).

Problem 2:
==========

Element sub have attribute alias 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/#S3.1.11) 
which contains text for pronuncation. However it is not possible to 
attach any ITS category to single attribute. Moreover using attributes 
for natural language text is against XML I18N BP. Using subelement for 
alias will be better solution.

Solution 2:
===========

Use alias subelement instead of attribute.


Any comments or suggestions.
If there are no comments, I think that we should submit this to SSML WG 
and not wait to next telcon because it is after LC end.

					Jirka

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