Action-Item: SML

Hi all,

I had the action item to look at SML from the viewpoint of ITS.

SML's Sep-12 Working Draft is here:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-sml-20080912/

As far as I can tell SML is more like a vocabulary that is meant to be used inside schemas written in XSD or Schematron, or inside
other XML documents.

With this in mind there is very little that seems related to localization and internationalization as most of the language-dependant
content is actually hold in the host format.

There is however one mechanism provided that is related to localization:

The sml:locid attribute allows you to define the translation location for the text content of the containing element.

For example: In this snippet of Schematron code, sml:locid hold the location of the translated text for the message of the
assertion.

<sch:assert test="smlfn:deref(.)[starts-with(u:ID,'99')]"
 sml:locid="lang:StudentIDErrorMsg">
 The specified ID <sch:value-of select="string(u:ID)"/> does not begin with 99.
</sch:assert> 

While this is a nice feature. The implementation of it is application specific. SML does not define how the substitution should be
don, nor what naming mechanism should be used, nor in what format the translation repository should be written in.

There is an appendix here http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-sml-20080912/#Localization_Sample that illustrate how sml:locid could work.

There are a number of issue with the example, but they are not directly related to ITS.

--- The value of the sml:locid attribute is a QName. In the example the namespace part is used to point to a directory where the
translated files are located, and the local part is the ID of the message to read. The name of the file itself is made of the
language tag a character underline, and the word "lang" (or the prefix of the namespace, the example is unclear if the fact that
both are the same is accidental or not).

--- The translation files are properties-like text file, where each entry can contains XML markup. This means to translate such
file, one would have to 

It would be better for the translation to be stored in an XML document, so its content could be annotated with ITS, and process more
easily. Having XML entries in a properties file makes thing difficult for most translation tools.

--- There is an error/typo in the French message: "L'identifieur specifie" should be "L'identifieur specifié" (an accent is
missing).


Overall, I'm not sure hat we should provide for feedback aside from the typo. Is there a generic way to associate language tag with
a file name so the filename could be automatically inferred? I guess the Java properties names is something similar.

Any ideas, suggestions?

Cheers,
-yves

Received on Monday, 20 October 2008 17:33:56 UTC