Re: Use of pronouns in style doc

[reading order is altered]

Richard Ishida wrote:

>  Of course, in normal text the process of translation would take care of
>  rendering the meaning in culturally acceptable syntax, and pronouns would
>  not be an issue (unless you used machine translation - which I wouldn't
>  recommend).

Is that so? I understood from Martin's article that first person should
be avoided anywhere except some special case like in the status section.

>  Although all the points Martin makes in
>  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2000AprJun/0058 are
>  indubitably true, I think it would be better to express the rule as:
>
>  "First person pronouns ('I', 'we') should not be used *in the text of
>  examples* because this can be hard to translate. See [PRONOUNS]."

If you have a moment, see if this note about examples helps.

http://www.w3.org/2001/06/manual/#Translations

>  And I think it would be better for [PRONOUNS] to point to something that
>  clearly includes the example Martin used in
>  http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-xml-linking-comments/2000JanMar/0079
>
>  .html (final paragraph)

Well, thanks to IANA and RFC 2606 and many reminders, example.com,
example.net, and example.org have taken the place of evocative domain
names in W3C specs. I would not link to MyAnything because W3C has no
control over what is returned over time. There have been some doozies.
Would a non-URI example help? If yes, maybe I could link to this:

http://www.w3.org/TR/1999/NOTE-xinclude-19991123#Infoset%20inclusion%20example

>  ... and in fact, the paragraph mentioned below may be better placed after
>  the para in 5.2 Translations, that begins "Although technical reports are
>  written in ...".

Moved.

Thanks very much for your comments. (The errata link idea in your third
message is great and I hope you get some more replies about it.)

Received on Saturday, 13 October 2001 04:08:27 UTC