Re: spec-DTD for non-normative annotations?

Hello Stefan,

At 10:40 AM 9/8/00 +0200, Stefan Mintert wrote:
>I'm working on a project with the German W3C Office in order to
>translate all of the W3C Recommendations to German. Additionaly to the
>translation we want the translators to add annotations to make the specs
>more understandable (sorry ;-), maybe to add some specific German
>information. For example: if XML supports Unicode, what does it mean for
>German umlauts? Questions like that shall be answered in the non
>normative annotations.

This would, of course, be a *great* XLink application: Write the 
annotations separately, then make extended links that emanate from the 
specification and generate clickable text and pop-ups.  Tim Bray did this 
in a fairly simple fashion for his Annotated XML Specification; I doubt his 
code has been maintained, but it might be a useful place to start if you're 
interested, and I think it's available (or at least a description of the 
process is) at XML.com.  But since you're "touching" the source files 
anyway, it's not so bad to introduce new text directly into them.

>We want to write all translations in XML according to the spec DTD (I
>already translated two RECs using my own DTD). Currently I begin to use
>spec DTD 2.1 (downloaded from
>http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec-report).
>
>My questions are
>- is this the latest version of spec DTD?
>- if not, where can I find the latest version?

Yes, V2.1 is currently the latest.  You can always get the latest version 
from http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/06/xmlspec.dtd.

>- yes, i can make my own version of spec DTD that would include an
>element named <non-normative-annotation> for example. but would it be
>possible to include such an element in the official spec DTD? if yes, I
>would like to participate in the discussion of the needs for an
>extension to the spec DTD.

An interesting idea.  What do people think about building a "layered 
annotation" facility right into the DTD?  Personally, as an XML Linking 
co-chair and XLink editor, I'd rather see an extended-link application. :-)

For the moment, if you want to use the DTD without modification, you could 
perhaps use the <note> element with a role attribute of 
"non-normative-annotation", and then make your stylesheet behave 
differently for those notes.

Thanks for the suggestion!

         Eve
--
Eve Maler                                          +1 781 442 3190
Sun Microsystems XML Technology Center    eve.maler @ east.sun.com

Received on Friday, 8 September 2000 09:46:54 UTC