I18n-related comments on Xform 1.1

Dear XForm editor,

I've been looking at XForm 1.1 WD (http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xforms11-20070222/) and I have a few notes:


--- 1) Is the WG planning to provide an ITS Rule file along with the specification (e.g. as a non-normative appendix)?

[[ Just in case if you are not familiar with ITS: It is a Proposed Recommendation (planning to go as Recommendation next week) that
define a set of elements and attributes that provide "read-to-go" internationalization features. See also: http://www.w3.org/TR/its/
]]

For instance, when I look at the second XML code sample in section 2.1, I see several elements containing text: <label> and <value>.
Most, if not all, localization tools, as well as ITS, assume element content is translatable. However in this case I'm guessing that
<value>Cash</Cash> is not.

While this is fine because tools have ways to specify an element should not be translated, it is very often quite difficult no know
*which elements* is like that. Having a list of elements that are non-translatable (or conversely if there are more non-translatable
than translatable elements) would help a lot.

This list could be expressed using ITS rules. This way all user of translation tools (or other language-related applications such as
spell-checker, machine-translation engines, etc) could look up that set of rules and process accordingly. In this example it would
be as simple as:

<its:rules xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its" version="1.0">
 <its:translateRule selector="//value" translate="no"/>
</its:rules>


--- 2) In the example "G.3 Survey Using XForms and SVG"

The 'é' in the different occurrences of 'latté' displays as a block in IE7 and as a '?' in FireFox. I'm guessing the HTML file is
not in the encoding it declares.


--- 3) The section "E.3.1 Script Tokens" lists possible values for inputMode. It says the values have been taken from Unicode 3.2.
Maybe it's worth checking it against the latest version of Unicode (5.0 now) and make addition as needed? [Just a suggestion]


--- 4) The example "G.1 XForms in XHTML" is actually something usually frown upon in localization: Having a source file in multiple
languages.

Such files are very difficult to process in a normal localization workflow. For example if you had to translate the file in German
you would have to add HTML and XForm code rather than just take the English source and translate it. Also if you have the file to
translate into several languages, you have to use different translator and re-consolidate the file after all are done (rather than
translate in parallel.

I realize this is just an example meant to illustrate many of XForm features, but if the same goal could be achieved in a
monolingual file (not necessarily English) it would be much better from the perspective of internationalization.


I hope this helps.

Kind regards,
-yves