RE: Input to Best Practice 18: Assign unique identifiers to text items when possible

Hi Andrzej,

> Sorry for what might appear to be repetition of my previous post 
> on this topic. Is it not possible to mention xml:tm as a viable 
> way of achieving unique text identifiers.

I'm afraid this would be too specific to point at xml:tm id system. BP 18 aims at a very general practice. xml:tm id system is very
specific and has a lot of constraints that simply do not apply to many XML structures. It's tailored for xml:tm and fill the BP 18
requirements, but I fear that using it as an example would be a bit confusing for readers. They would have to understand what xml:tm
structure does over the host format structure to understand the id scheme; and that would take some effort to convey clearly and
concisely in an example. Also xml:tm is a specialized multilingual format, that is not one of the 'source' format we use generally.
I have nothing against xml:tm, but I honestly think it would not help here.


> xml:tm is the only standard to date that references W3C ITS directly 
> (in fact W3C ITS is mandated by xml:tm), and is most likely to be the
> main way in which the W3C ITS is actually used and implemented. 

It's is great that xml:tm mandates ITS. But I hope ITS will not be limited to integration with other standards, and to be used on
its own. I certainly expect many translation or language-processing tools to make use of it: WorldServer-9 has some support for it
already, Heartsome tools list it for version 7, etc.


> It might be nice to reciprocate this in BP 18.

You have too big of a heart Andrzej :) I'm much more cynical and think it would be a bit suspect to to refer to something only to be
nice because the something refers to you. I certainly hope that xml:tm does not mandate ITS just to be nice to the W3C, but because
of requirements and technical choices :)

Cheers,
-yves

Received on Thursday, 20 September 2007 20:45:13 UTC