Re: I18n-ISSUE-5: Use of attributes for human readable text [WOFF]

Hello ,

Richard Ishida wrote:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-font/2010OctDec/0104.html
  
> In the schema description, various items that contain human readable
> text are stored as attribute values. We normally recommend that you
> don't do this (see http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#DevAttributes)
> because of potential translation and annotation difficulties (eg.
> markup of bidi text). In several cases these attributes are the only
> content on empty elements.

> See also the comment we will raise about localization of other
> elements, such as credit. Making the name attribute of the credit
> element into an element would allow for localizations of the name
> text, which is currently not possible.

> We would suggest converting the attributes to element content. In
> most cases, this does not seem to cause any significant increase in
> the size of the markup.

The WebFonts WG has discussed this and evaluated both the positive and
negative impact on current authoring tools and deployed content.

We looked at the impact of changing attribute content to element
content, which would make all deployed content invalid. This was felt
to be too high a price to pay.

We also looked at the impact of allowing both the attribute and the
element content (for backwards compatibility, although this also
requires specifying which of the two sources of information has
precedence when both are supplied).  This was felt to be clumsy but
workable, if need be; but the positive benefit did not seem to be
worth the extra complexity for these specific attributes.

While sympathetic to the general principle, in practice the examples
we looked at (such as @name on credit, vendor and licensee) would
contain a proper name which is not translated anyway.

Once example we could think of where this would help would be a
Japanese name with Ruby markup to indicate the pronunciation in the
case of a name using rare characters. This use case, while valid, fell
quite far from the benefit/complexity trade off. If complex markup is
required, a link to an HTML page which can contain more complex
formatting and styling would be a better approach.

The metadata in WOFF is intended to be a simple and small description,
primarily to ensure that the license information for a deployed font
is clear. it is not intended to be a full page description language
rivalling HTML, PDF or XSL-FO in its expressive power. url attributes
are provided for linking to further details, including cases where
more precise formatting or structuring is required.

The WebFonts WG therefore regretfully rejects this particular comment,
on the grounds of too much disruption of existing content for too
little gain, and hopes that the I18n WG can accept this resolution of
their comment.

Tracker, this relates to 
I18n-ISSUE-5: Use of attributes for human readable text [WOFF]
ACTION-78: Respond on Use of attributes for human readable text

(sorry for the pollution, issue and action prefixes on font WG tracks seem to have stopped working)

-- 
 Chris Lilley   Technical Director, Interaction Domain                 
 W3C Graphics Activity Lead, Fonts Activity Lead
 Co-Chair, W3C Hypertext CG
 Member, CSS, WebFonts, SVG Working Groups

Received on Wednesday, 6 April 2011 13:34:50 UTC