Checklists for reviews

A comment made during yesterday's Core telecon set me thinking, as I was reading the EMMA specification today.  

Often we are making similar comments on specifications because we need to ensure that people consider the same issues each time.  Charmod{1} was written in an attempt to allow spec developers in other WGs to know what we would be looking for before we reviewed their spec - at least in the area of characters and encodings - before we reached the LastCall phase.

I've long wanted to better document the types of thing spec writers should look for, so that we can reduce the burden of spec reviews and build things in to specs rather than retrofit them.  

I'd like to encourage the group to try to draw out general best practices while reviewing documents and compile them somewhere.  Note that the ITS XML best practices document has the potential to effect some of this, although they are focused specifically on the audiences of XML schema developers and content authors, rather than W3C spec developers, so they have a slightly different remit.  There are other obvious areas where this would be helpful too, such as time zone and duration handling, etc.

These best practices can be used not only to educate spec developers, but also as checklists during reviews.

To kick things off I'm thinking of doing two things:

[1] listing relevant conformance criteria from charmod fundamentals in a form like http://www.w3.org/International/techniques/charset linked to from a techniques index entry for spec developers considering character encoding (where each bp links to the charmod doc for further information)

[2] making a beginning on other lists such as follows

I'm thinking of making these lists very informal to begin with.  We can then formalise them further by producing Notes at some later date when time allows.

What do you think?



Here are some quick thoughts I pulled from the top of my head for best practices related to language declaration and bidi.  (These may also be of use to the ITS effort.)

=================
Language declaration

it must be possible to declare the default language of text on the root element

it must be possible to declare changes in language at any point in the document (this may necessitate the use of a span-like element)

language values must conform to BCP 47

xml:lang should be used to declare the language of text in XML formats whenever possible

language information that does not describe the text in the document should not use xml:lang

it must be possible to use xml:lang="", or a similar construct if xml:lang is not used, to indicate that language information is undefined for a range of text within a document

absence of a language declaration on the root of a document should mean that language information is undefined for the document in question


Bidi

it should be possible to indicate that the default directionality of a document is right to left in the root element

the default directionality for a document should be left-to-right

it should be possible to indicate changes in directional context for any range of text in the document (this may necessitate the use of a span-like element), and allowing for ltr, rtl, lro, rlo

it should be possible to use &rlo; and &lro; to represent Unicode characters ... and ... respectively

the Unicode characters RLE, LRE, RLO, LRO and PDF should not be used or required - markup should be available

=================

RI



{1} http://www.w3.org/TR/charmod/
============
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)
 
http://www.w3.org/People/Ishida/
http://www.w3.org/International/
http://people.w3.org/rishida/blog/
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Received on Wednesday, 25 April 2007 16:19:55 UTC