[SMIL30 LC comment] from ITS Working Group

Hello,

the ITS Working Group would like to make the following last call comment 
on SMIL 3.0 [1] .

We would like you to adopt ITS 1.0 [2] as the preferred means for the 
internationalization and localization of SMIL 3.0 documents. Concretely, 
we propose the adoption of

1) an ITS "Translate" rule [3] to separate translatable and 
non-translatable content,
2) an ITS "Elements Within Text" rule [4] to describe the flow 
characteristics of elements, and
3) an SMIL 3.0 schema which contains ITS 1.0 markup declarations for 1) 
and 2).

No 1) is important information for the localization of SMIL 3.0 
documents, e.g. to make the life of translators easier. No 2) is useful 
e.g. for spell checking tools.

The ITS rules file we want to propose for 1) and 2) look like this:

<its:rules
  xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its"
  xmlns:s="http://www.w3.org/2007/07/SMIL30/" version="1.0">
 <its:translateRule selector="//s:*" translate="no"/>
 <its:translateRule selector="//s:smilText | //s:div | //s:p | //s:span 
| //s:@title" translate="yes"/>
 <its:withinTextRule selector="//s:span" withinText="yes"/>
</its:rules>

ITS rules, see [5], are are a means to express ITS 1.0 information 
independent of the target document, without a need to change your (SMIL 
3.0) document. They deploy XPath for that purpose, see the "selector" 
attributes. The rules are contained in an <its:rules> wrapper element.

The first two rules are used to separate translatable and 
non-translatable content. They can be read as: the default for elements 
is that they are not translatable (first <translateRule> element). The  
exceptions (translatable elements and attribute content) are handled by 
the second <translateRule> element, which takes precedence over the 
first one. We assume that the translatable elements and attributes in a 
SMIL 3.0 file are: smilText element [6], div element [7], p element [8], 
span element [9] and title attribute [10]. It would be great to get your 
feedback on this list.

The third rule about "Elements within Text" describes that the <span> 
element appears in the flow of other elements, like <smilText>, <p> or 
<div>. The default for "Elements Within Text" is that elements are not 
nested.

About no. 3): we propose that SMIL 3.0 provides a schema which contains 
the ITS markup declarations [11]. These markup declarations allow for 
specifying a lot of more information related to internationalization and 
localization, like localization notes [12] or terminology information 
[13]. Possibly, you would not need all markup declarations available at 
[11]. We would be very willing to adapt the existing ITS markup 
declarations to your specific needs, if you agree on the general proposal.

Note that we don't propose that a conformant SMIL 3.0 implementation 
needs to process 1), 2) or 3). Nevertheless, their availability would be 
very valuable for internationalization and localization related tasks, 
and the world-wide adoption of SMIL 3.0

We are looking forward for you feedback. Thank you,

Felix

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/
[3] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#translatability-implementation
[4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#within-text-implementation
[5] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#selection-global
[6] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-text.html#edef-smilText
[7] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-text.html#edef-textDiv
[8] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-text.html#edef-textP
[9] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-text.html#edef-span
[10] 
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-SMIL3-20070713/smil-structure.html#adef-title
[11] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#its-schemas
[12] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#locNote-datacat
[13] http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/REC-its-20070403/#terminology

Received on Wednesday, 5 September 2007 06:32:08 UTC