Re: targetPointer Requirement update

Thanks, Yves, for the explanation of why it's needed. I hadn't realized what the function was until your last mail and I think it makes sense to have this feature. My one concern is whether targetPointer will be power enough to allow a tool to process an XLIFF or TMX file without breaking it. I've not really thought this through yet, so if it isn't an issue, so much the better. But my worry would be that if a process uses targetPointer to add translations to a file that it otherwise knows nothing about and breaks it in the process, we may be creating bigger problems than we would by saying "This is an XLIFF file: don't touch it unless you know about XLIFF.” That said, I don't have a sense for how likely problems are and it may be that the only way to find out is to implement the proposal and see what actually happens.

-Arle

Sic scripsit Felix Sasaki in May 7, 2012 ad 06:20 :

> 
> 
> 2012/5/4 Yves Savourel <ysavourel@enlaso.com>
> Hi Dave, all,
> 
> > However, this explanation does make me think the
> > use case is out of scope for ITS 2.0.  because:
> > ...
> > ii) There are already standard file formats, i.e. XLIFF,
> > TMX, that support this.
> > ... not using these is not best practice.
> > So it doesn't seem in scope to develop a standard
> > solution for something that isn't best practice or
> > in general is needed solely to support issues in
> > proprietary formats.
> 
> XLIFF and TMX are precisely why something like targetPointer is needed.
> 
> ITS is not meant just for translation. As applications like Tadej's Enrycher show, one may want to perform other linguistic-related tasks (e.g. semantic tagging, spell-checking, data-mining, alignment, creation of an MT-generated TM, etc).
> 
> I think we should expect any XML tool that ITS2-aware to be able to read a document in format XYZ only knowing its ITS properties. It shouldn't need to know about XLIFF or TMX to process XLIFF or TMX documents.
> 
> A big +1.
> 
> Felix
>  
> Currently such application cannot read an XLIFF document properly.
> 
> Cheers,
> -yves
> 
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> 
> -- 
> Felix Sasaki
> DFKI / W3C Fellow
>