Re: ITS Rule file (PR#119)

Hi Felix,

Even as an informative appendix or working group note, it has a wrong feel 
to it without more effort.  Someone with a really good grasp of both ITS 
and everything that is possible in XForms would be needed to write it, for 
one thing.  It is not even clear to me that both of the rules you did 
write are correct.  The one for output seems suspect since output can 
derive its value using ref, value or the content of *a contained label*. 
Other contained elements like actions would not be translatable by 
default.

It feels like it might be misleading form authors to tell them to create 
ITS files when it is not clear how they might succeed at that.  It's never 
going to be true that in form A you should translate calculates and in 
form B you should not.  Unless ITS has an incredible amount of precision, 
it may be impossible to define an ITS file for the form. 

John M. Boyer, Ph.D.
STSM: Lotus Forms Architect and Researcher
Chair, W3C Forms Working Group
Workplace, Portal and Collaboration Software
IBM Victoria Software Lab
E-Mail: boyerj@ca.ibm.com 

Blog: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/JohnBoyer





Felix Sasaki <fsasaki@w3.org> 
Sent by: www-forms-editor-request@w3.org
10/31/2007 12:52 AM

To
John Boyer/CanWest/IBM@IBMCA
cc
public-i18n-its@w3.org, unl@dreamlab.net, www-forms-editor@w3.org, 
www-forms-editor-request@w3.org
Subject
Re: ITS Rule file (PR#119)







Many thanks for the feedback, John.

John Boyer wrote:
>
> Hi Felix,
>
> I am not an ITS expert, but I am pretty sure you didn't get it all 
> with that file.
sure. What we think is that this file encompasses the rules which should 
be relevant for all XForms documents. The files we proposed are only a 
basic ITS definition.

>
> What about literals in calculate, relevant, required, readonly?
from my understanding, e.g. calculate might contain translatable text in 
some cases, but in others not. I did not check for the other markup in 
your list above. However, the rules we supplied are for the general case.
> What about content in xforms instance?  This is raw data, not subject 
> to translation... necessarily.
>
> What about things like xforms labels, which could express their 
> content directly (making translation easy) or which could express 
> their content using binding attributes to instance data (making it 
> much harder to determine what must be translated).
>
> I'm not being exhaustive here...

I'd propose the following:
- having an appendix with the small rules we proposed
- having in that appendix a paragraph which describes the need for 
XForms users to define ITS rules on their own - depending on the cases 
you described.

What do you think?

Felix
>