[Comment on jlreq WD]

Congratulations on the new draft.  It is looking very good, and is very 
exciting.

1.  May I suggest that s1.3  "Basic Principles for Development of this 
Document"  should have an additional numbered list item

"i. It does not cover specific Japanese table and layout idioms."

When I worked in the publishing industry in Japan, 20 years ago, and 
when I worked in Taiwan 10 years ago researching Chinese typesetting 
requirements (among other things), I was continually impressed by the 
variety of CJK table forms: these will be of course familiar to the CJK 
people on the Working Group. These forms spring out of the size and uses 
of kanji in table headings, often. Westerners are universally unaware of 
their existence, and often belittle them when they see them. I believe 
they have never been formally standardized in CJK countries either.

Which means they are a common cultural artifact, highly suited for CJK 
documents, developed in CJK areas, and widely popular in the days of 
hand-layout of tables, which do not have good support by Western-sourced 
technology.  Internationalization to the rescue!

I can understand if the I18n WG wants to prioritize composition in this 
spec, but I suggest that this paragraph (above) would at least be an 
acknowledgment that there are issues such as CJK tables that are 
floating around.

2. I think you should adopt the editorial policy of using the English 
phrase then the Japanese technical term as a suffix, for the English 
version.  For example "page content area (kihon hanmen)"  rather than 
"hihon hanmen (page content area)".  And certainly never just "kihon 
hanmen".   The Japanese version can have the opposite.  If the goal of 
the English version is to make the ideas more available to non-Japanese, 
that would be a better policy I think.  Westerners do not like flipping 
to indexes or lists (when I worked in Japan, one of the tasks we had to 
do for moving Japanese texts to Western text was moving index material 
to the main body more.)  The current draft reads almost like a lesson in 
Japanese rather than an explanation of concepts, because of this, if you 
see what I mean.

Cheers
Rick Jelliffe

(Formerly, invited expert, W3C I18n IG)

Received on Friday, 24 October 2008 07:10:23 UTC