Comment on ITS 2.0 specification WD, i18n-ISSUE-212: HTML5 in the ITS spec

There was a thread on www-international 
[http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2013JanMar/0044.html] 
sparked by a comment about the relationship of its:term to dfn in HTML5 
which can be widened to a more general discussion, ie. should the ITS 
spec fully describe the relationship between other elements and and 
attributes in HTML5 that relate to the data categories in ITS (see Yves' 
comments at 
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/www-international/2013JanMar/0044.html]

In discussing this with Felix during the i18n WG telecon, we concluded 
that ITS is trying to normatively specify relationships between HTML5 
markup and ITS data categories only where a normative and complete 
relationship is tenable, ie. lang and translate attributes in HTML5 are 
examples where the markup is fully consistent with ITS data categories 
and cannot be used in other ways, so a normative link can be established.

Not all HTML5 markup can be linked to ITS so completely. For example, 
its:term could be represented in HTML5 by dfn element, or by a dt 
element, but either of those elements could also be used for another 
purpose. HTML5 markup that can't be associated uniquely with ITS data 
categories in this way will be described in the Best Practices document.

If this is what the ITS group intends, then I think the ITS 
specification needs significant editorial work to make this clearer.

For example, section 1.1.1 Relation to ITS 1.0 says "While ITS 1.0 
addressed only XML, ITS 2.0 specifies implementations of data categories 
in both XML and HTML". And 1.1.2 New Principles says: "ITS 2.0 data 
categories are intended to be format neutral, with support for XML, 
HTML, and NIF: a data category implementation only needs to support a 
single content format mapping in order to support a claim of ITS 2.0 
conformance". And 1.4 Usage in HTML says "ITS 2.0 adds support for usage 
in HTML." These statements give the impression that ITS will fully 
describe the relationships between ITS and HTML5 in the spec.

I think it will also help to clarify, where examples related to HTML5 
appear (for example, Example 44 in the section on Terminology), that 
these only illustrate some of the ways in which some of the markup in 
HTML could be mapped to ITS, and do not relate to normative behaviour, 
and they are not exhaustive.


[i18n WG endorsed: No, but benefiting from WG discussion]


-- 
Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/

Received on Wednesday, 16 January 2013 19:42:31 UTC