Re: issue-51 too many global rules

On 23/10/2012 14:52, Felix Sasaki wrote:
> I know - my point is not about pointers, but about "adding information 
> *without fixed values* to attributes or elements". I just can't 
> imagine people writing rules like this
>
> <its:locQualityIssueRule selector="//span[@id='q1']"
> locQualityIssueType="typographical" locQualityIssueComent="Sentence without
> capitalization" locQualityIssueSeverity="50"/>
>
> That is, tailored to one "span" element. Am I wrong?

Hi Felix,
I think you are right on the point that authoring global rules doesn't 
scale for individual spans. You make the same point well in relation to 
provenance in:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-multilingualweb-lt/2012Oct/0093.html

That was in response to my suggestion that it may be 'convenient' to 
write global rules in certain circumstances. To give a more concrete 
example, look at the source view on a microsoft support page, e.g.:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/crop-a-picture-or-place-it-in-a-shape-HA102749423.aspx?CTT=1

There you would see fragments like:
<li>Click <b class="ui">Picture Tools</b>&gt; <b 
class="ui">Format</b>&gt; <b class="ui">Size</b>and click the arrow 
under <b class="ui">Crop</b>.</li>
here's where a class attribute identifies a type of content likely to be 
treated differently during localization. So having a global rule with a 
selector="//b[@class='ui'] would be more convenient for overriding, e.g. 
the provenance of translation by software translators for these nodes 
over provenance recording documentation translators for the rest of the 
page.

It would be interesting to hear from out Microsoft friends on how they 
do this in practice. Presumably this is generated from some source 
content and they may have tooling that can easily manage the insertion 
of local mark-up - but for other trying to address the same problem more 
manually, one can imagine that global rules, especially related to class 
attributes or <code> elements, would indeed be a convenience.

It would be good to hear from some of the industrial implementers on 
whether this really is a convenience or not for them. If not, i would 
not strongly feel the need to retain global rules purely for the 
convenience of avoiding local mark-up in these cases.

However, I think Yves' point that we would loose the ability to mark-up 
attributes without global rules is a much stronger argument for 
retaining them - that feels like a real loss of expressiveness that is 
already established in ITS1.0.

cheers,
Dave