RE: Comment on ITS 2.0 specification WD, i18n-ISSUE-213: its-term in example 44

Hi everyone,

According to http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/CR-html5-20121217/text-level-semantics.html#the-dfn-element the <dfn> tag requires a term definition to be nearby, I quote:
"The dfn element represents the defining instance of a term. The paragraph, description list group, or section that is the nearest ancestor of the dfn element must also contain the definition(s) for the term given by the dfn element."

This is definitely not the case for all terms in all contexts. However, the <dfn> tag, in my opinion, can annotate a (very limited) subset of what the Terminology data category can annotate...

One thing though - such markup (the <dfn> tag) usually is produced by either humans (in non-automated processes) or very limited purpose terminology identification processes (automated or semi-automated) that try identifying "term<->definition" patterns in documents (the definition can also express relation between terminological concepts). That is, the <dfn> tag may allow identifying concept relations, however, as far as I understand from the HTML 5 definition, the <dfn> tag is not suited for annotation of terms without relations expressed in the context.

For instance, the following example (from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLEU) shows where the "dfn" tag may be applied and where it would (again - in my understanding) be wrong to apply it (simply because the HTML 5 definition restricts such application):

<dfn>BLEU</dfn> (<dfn>Bilingual Evaluation Understudy</dfn>) is an <span its-term="yes">algorithm</span> for <span its-term="yes">evaluating</span> the <span its-term="yes">quality of text</span> which has been <span its-term="yes">machine-translated</span> from one <span its-term="yes">natural language</span> to another.

Feel free to correct me if I got the meaning of the <dfn> tag wrong from the HTML 5 reference.

Best regards,
Mārcis ;o)

-----Original Message-----
From: Richard Ishida [mailto:ishida@w3.org] 
Sent: Wednesday, January 16, 2013 9:44 PM
To: public-multilingualweb-lt-comments@w3.org; www International
Subject: Comment on ITS 2.0 specification WD, i18n-ISSUE-213: its-term in example 44

Example 44: The Terminology data category expressed locally in HTML http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-its20-20121206/#terminology-implementation


This example seems to be recommending use of its-term in HTML5, whereas there are other more standard ways of idnentifying terms in HTML5, eg. 
using dfn. I don't think this is a useful example (unless it gets heavily qualified by additional text - but even then, i'm doubtful.)

[comment not discussed by i18n WG]




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

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

http://rishida.net/

Received on Thursday, 17 January 2013 07:47:18 UTC