Re: QA of HTML 4.0 translations

On Tue, 13 Jan 1998, Misha Wolf wrote:

> Which is the appropriate mailing list for this subject?  Is the w3c-html-wg 
> list now closed?

   w3c-translators@w3.org

I am about to breathe life into this list (its very quiet right
now), as I have just caught up with my backlog of email. 

Send an email to w3c-translators-request@w3.org with the word
subscribe in the subject line. (I have added the details for this to
the HTML home page and to the translations page. 

> I'm somewhat concerned at having seen no QA criteria regarding
> translations of the HTML 4.0 specification.  Presumably, any links
> to such translations will carry a W3C disclaimer regarding the
> correctness of the translation.  Hence, I'm not too worried about
> that aspect. 

Fine.

Remember that all these people are volunteers, and by and large are
not receiving payment for their work (certainly not from W3C).
We therefore need to offer help and guidance.

> There are, however, other aspects where bad examples could easily
> be set by such translations.  I have in mind the possible abuse of
> HTML and of the HTML spec at a lower level than the visible text
> and am thinking of issues such as: 
> 
>    -  the use of illegal or incorrect language codes or their omission,
> 
>    -  the use of illegal or incorrect meta charset tags or their omission,
> 
>    -  the use of illegal or incorrect bidi constructs or their omission,
> 
>    -  the use of illegal or incorrect NCRs or entity names.
> 
> Some of these errors could be caught by automated scripts.  Has
> any thought been given to producing such scripts or to other QA
> measures? 

This sounds like something for the W3C validation service which is
based around nsgmls.

My HTML tidy tool also sounds like a good target for this, see

   http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy/

It operates directly on files, and I plan to extend it to support
Unicode and other common file encodings. Your suggestions for
what tests should be added would be most welcome.

I would very much like to add some tutorial material to the W3C
HTML site and would very much appreciate contributions, particularly
relating to internationalization. Would you be able to help?

Regards,

-- Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
phone: +44 122 578 2984 (or 2521) +44 385 320 444 (gsm mobile)
World Wide Web Consortium (on assignment from HP Labs)

Received on Tuesday, 13 January 1998 11:32:44 UTC