Thoughts and question about spec-DTD and stylesheets for translated specs

Hello,

as I mentioned earlier (sept) on this list, I'm working with the German
W3C office to translate all W3C RECs into the German language. Meanwhile
we have many translators and I started to change the spec-DTD to fit our
needs.

My goal is to change as little as possible. The reason why I'm changing
the DTD at all is, that we want to include non-normative annotations.
Some of you (Eve and Jose) gave me two advices:

1) Separate annotations from specs and use XLink to link both together
2) Use the 'note' element with an 'role' attribute value of (for
example) 'translators-note'


My own preference would be choice (1); I would really like to do this.
Currently I think we can't do this because:
a) we want to get results as soon as possible
b) we need good tool support for this; there are good DTD-aware editors
(unfortunately, although I'd liked it, this is not a research or
development project)
c) we want to import the result in a DTD programm (probably FrameMaker),
that only knows about DTDs

Of course I could write an application, which merges the spec and the
annotation together and writes a single XML instance for import in FM.
But I don't have the time now; maybe in the future.
I hope that I can later split the specs and annotations that will be
written, in order to make a XLink application out of what we're
producing now.



Ok, choice number (2) looks very good to me. The first little problem
is, that authors would have to write the correct attribute value in the
role attribute. But I guess, that shouldn't be a serious problem.

For a while I thought about not changing the DTD, but there's one point
that still is a problem: I need a second header element for metadata
about a translation. In the current version of spec-DTD there's no
element to place this kind of information in. 

I decided to change the DTD and to include an element called
transheader. Since I already changed the DTD I added a second new
element called transnote, to get around the minor problem mentioned
before. Of course I don't need all child elements of 'header' in the new
'transheader'. 

I append my very first version of the trans-spec-DTD below. Any answer,
comment or improvement is appreciated!
At the moment I don't like that neither an instance of spec-DTD is an
instance of trans-spec nor vice versa. I'd like to reach compatibility
of some kind.


The next step will be to change the XSLT-Stylesheet. Some of the string
constants, such as 'Table of Contents', have to be changed. Is there a
place in spec-DTD where to note the language in which the text is
written? I don't think that 'langusage' is the right place, is it? What
about an attribute to the spec-Element called 'xml:lang'. Of course I
could add such an element to 'transheader'. But in my opinion,
<transheader xml:lang="de"> would mean that the contents of the
transheader element is written in German. There's nothing said about the
contents of the spec element. 



Ok, that are my thoughts for now. Thanks in advance for any help!


Bye,

  Stefan.

--

  Mintert Consulting - Building Future Directions

  http://mintert.com/


------


Following my DTD; it'a almost copy and paste. I removed comments about
origin and copyright...


<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- Changed Entity Definitions .................................. -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!ENTITY % spec.mdl
        "header, transheader, front?, body, back?">

<!ENTITY % local.note.class     " | transnote">



<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- Original XML Specification DTD .............................. -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!ENTITY % orig-xml-spec-dtd
        PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD Specification V2.1//EN"
        "xmlspec-v21.dtd">
%orig-xml-spec-dtd;




<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- New Entities ................................................ -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->


<!ENTITY % transheader.mdl
        "version?, pubdate, notice*, publoc, ((prevlocs, latestloc?) |
        (latestloc, prevlocs?))?, authlist, copyright,
	pubstmt?, sourcedesc?, revisiondesc">


<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- New Elements ................................................ -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->


<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- Translation header .......................................... -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->


<!ELEMENT transheader (%transheader.mdl;)>
<!ATTLIST transheader %common.att;>


<!-- ............................................................. -->
<!-- Notes ....................................................... -->
<!-- ............................................................. -->

<!ELEMENT transnote (%obj.mix;)+>
<!ATTLIST transnote %common.att;>

Received on Friday, 17 November 2000 06:12:18 UTC