mlw-lt-track-ISSUE-38 (remove-local-target-pointer): Remove local target pointer

mlw-lt-track-ISSUE-38 (remove-local-target-pointer): Remove local target pointer

http://www.w3.org/International/multilingualweb/lt/track/issues/38

Raised by: Felix Sasaki
On product: 

I propose to remove the local target pointer attribute its:targetPointer.

Reason: we did not local pointing to existing information in ITS 1.0 - for good reasons, see below. So this is a new general mechanism, and we already introduced others (like parameters for XPath). That creates more complexity, e.g.
- would the parameters provided via its:param also be related to local pointing?
- how does the query language attribute to local pointing?
- can local pointing be implemented efficiently?
Local pointing to existing information also creates a conformance issue: do we require local implementations to understand XPath or other query languages? So far we didn't.

For targterPointer, Everything we want can be done with global too. Local markup for target pointer only would make sense if there is a few examples of multilingual aligned structures in the document. But I think we are talking about formats that have a regular structure, i.e. a list of pairs source - target. With such formats, a single "global target pointer" rule does the job.

So the proposal is to remove local target pointer and to also agree on having no other local pointing to. This also will help with being in sync with HTML5 / CSS: CSS also has selectors only position independently - there is no local counterpart.

Received on Friday, 3 August 2012 21:05:37 UTC