RE: Comments on "TML proposal"

Hi Brian, all,

> ITS is a XML based standard which, as far as I am 
> aware, nobody has implemented in the real world.

Maybe that is part of the problem: one cannot be aware of everything :)
ITS is implemented in the real world. Every work day (literally) I use (for 'real' work on 'real' projects, paid by 'real' customers) at least 3 tools (2 commercial and 1 open-source) that implements ITS.



> It is an example of a bloated and over-engineered solution 
> that was designed by people who have little operational 
> experience writing useful software (see also SOAP).

As one of the people you are talking about I can only agree: We have absolutely no operational experience, very little practice and I would add that we are generally not very smart anyway.
But I'll challenge the 'bloated' part, with an example from your article:

In TML you have:

<p>The company’s sales <span class="TML">pipeline</span>
<span class="comment" style="display:none">In this context, 
pipeline refers to potential customers, not real pipeline</span>
is nearly full.</p>


The same thing in ITS is:

<p>The company’s sales <span its-loc-note="In this context, 
pipeline refers to potential customers, not real pipeline">pipeline</span>
is nearly full.</p>

It honestly looks simpler too me.

It also does not require CAT tools which do not supporting the annotation to do anything special, while your TML example does require the tools to understand at least style="display:none". The TML notation also add more tags, something that is bound to cause some issues down the line, in translation part of the workflow.

As far as implementations, you can use some XML/HTML editors to set the comment without going in the source (e.g. see bgriffon.png attached), and even Trados Studio manages to display the comment (see ts2014.png attached).

There is an ITS library for JQuery (https://github.com/attrib/jquery-its2), another in Java, a plug-in for OpenOffice, and much more.


> Practicing software developers tends to favor lightweight 
> and easy to implement solutions (this is why JSON won out
> over XML for data interchange).

In some domains JSON is more used, in other XML is more used (and never JSON), it all depends on the area of work.

In any case, I'm sure you'll be happy to know that there is work being done on JSON+ITS :)


There are good ideas in your article Brian (like ITS could possible use a data categories for synonyms), and essentially TML is using a similar mechanism as ITS. ITS is just not design only for HTML but as a more generic system, and it does encompasses more than the stated goals of TML. So overall it may look a bit complicated, but you don't need all of ITS to address your goals.

My main point in my initial comments was that your article is trying to address something that has been worked on already, and it would have been nice for the readers to have a hint that some other solutions than TML do exist and have been implemented.

Kind regards,
-yves

Received on Thursday, 9 April 2015 23:00:58 UTC