Re: Sync languages - HTML

Chris Lilley writes:
 > 
 > 
 > > M. T. Carrasco Benitez writes:
 > >  > Which technique should be used to help syncronized multilingual para=
 > llel
 > >  > texts marked in HTML.
 > 
 > >  > Some suggestions:
 > >  >  2.1) NAME (in A)
 > >  >  2.2) ID
 > >  >  2.3) A new attribute in SPAN
 > 
 > That depends on whether you require the parallel translations to be in
 > separate documents or the same document.

It is important that we define both an interdocument and and
intradocument mechanism for aligned parallel translations.
This way we will support both the document management and the database
vendor community.

 > 
 > Having them in the same document makes adding new translations harder
 > because the last modify date changes even for unchanged existing
 > translations. This is bad for cacheing. It also makes layout harder.

Not all documents are cacheable . Imagine the kiosk application that
provides today's weather forecast for all the attendees at the
conference ...

<TABLE CLASS=aligned.columns.translated,aligned.rows.date.location>
<TR LANG=en_US CLASS=boston,weather,970117> Very cold 
<TD LANG=jp CLASS=boston,weather,970117> ...
<TR LANG=fr CLASS=paris,weather,970117> Partly cloudy
<TR LANG=jp CLASS=paris,weather,970117> ...
<TR LANG=en_UK CLASS=brisbane,weather,970118> Warm and wet
....

The local browser could selectively show all forecasts in French
speaking countries or perhaps all the EC countries without
contacting the server to generate a new page.

 > 
 > > e.g. The HEAD LINK element may be used to identify the language
 > > variants of a particular document. The CLASS attribute on an Anchor or
 > > Paragraph could identify an alignment point with a unique ID to mark
 > > the common structural elements.
 > >
 > >  <P ID=3Dp1 CLASS=3Dalignment          <P ID=3Dp1 CLASS=3Dalignment
 > >     LANG=3Den_US> ...                    LANG=3Dfr_CA> ...
 > 
 > My suggestion would be separate parallel documents, each using the
 > identical structure and liberal use of matching NAME or preferably ID
 > attributes as described by Gary, to allow browsers to present pairs of
 > synchronized documents which scroll in lockstep, follow internal
 > cross-references in lockstep, and so on.

Browsers could be constructed that either constrained the presentation
or enabled new functionality based on appropriately labeled documents.
Consider the browser configured for French-English viewing, with a
"folding" capability for structure and layout. Appropriately
configured, it could always present French columns on the right most
portion of the screen or leave the English columns hidden until
manually requested (ala delayed image loading). Such a browser could 
be configured to show a French Outline (automatic TOC) in an upper
frame with the English text and French text split between two lower
frames. 

 > 
 > One option is to use
 > 
 > LINK REL=3Dtranslation TITLE=3D"Egalement disponible en Fran=E7ais"
 > 
 > for example - though again this requires the document containing each
 > translation to be modified whenever a new translation is added.
 > 
 > Current work on Web Collections and on Manifests - both of which are
 > resources containing metadata and pointers to multiple documents -
 > offer a solution; each translation points to the collection/manifest
 > document which in turn points to all the available translations.
 > 
 > An additional benefit of using manifests is that they can contain digital=
 > ly
 > signed assertions about the collection, subsets, or individual documents,=
 > 
 > such as
 > 
 > "These documents are official authorized translations of CEN standard xxx=
 > 
 > and have equivalent legal status"  or
 > 
 > "This document is a work in progress Greek translation of document y;
 > it is presently incomplete"  or
 > 
 > "This document was translated into Urdu as a public service; I make no
 > promises as to quality or accuracy but hope it is useful"
 > 

I'm slowly coming around to believing that the DSig and metadata
efforts will have a significant impact in the web this year. If
they can solve a part of the naming problem and successfully deploy
the authoring technology (has to be easy to use to get market
penetration), then maybe we'll see collection support as standard
functionality in all the popular browsers. (Still a little
skeptical). 

 > 
 > 
 > 
 > -- =
 > 
 > Chris Lilley, W3C                          [ http://www.w3.org/ ]
 > Graphics and Fonts Guy            The World Wide Web Consortium
 > http://www.w3.org/people/chris/              INRIA,  Projet W3C
 > chris@w3.org                       2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93
 > +33 (0)4 93 65 79 87       06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
 > 
 > --PART-BOUNDARY=.19701221344.ZM12328.inria.fr--
 > 
 >

Received on Wednesday, 22 January 1997 08:54:08 UTC