Minutes of Nov. 25 telecon between I18n & VBWG regarding SSML issues

Minutes of the telecon between VB and Internationalization on November 
24, 2004.

Richard Ishida
Dan Burnet
Jim Larson
Martin Duerst

Reviewing old items and confirm the status of each old item:

Item 22: havent heard from Luk yet.

Item 2: Martin is going to elevate issue to Philips HCG group

Item 20: will discuss later

Item 51: VBWG will rewrite; will review with final text review

Item 54: Withdrawn

Now we move to the new items:

Item 46: Can be postponed to V3. This may introduce some 
incompatibilities if adopted.

Martin: Try to keep text out of attributes as much as possible in future 
revisions.
Dan: We want to keep text that is to be spoken as content and move other 
stuff to attributes.

Item 42: Concern with openness of alphabet set and difficulties in 
portability.

Dan: because of current state of the art and because different venders 
use different alphabets, we can not do this today. Even within 
alphabets, there may be different subsets that are implemented. VBWG 
examined several alternative solutions: We discussed several 
possibilities, with each having different disadvantages. There is no 
good W3C mechanism for reserving name spaces. Qualified names are 
extremely long. Full URI are also to long. Registered ID was disliked by 
all.

Dan: Currently we believe there will be self-policing in this area. Our 
final belief is that we did not want to make a specific decision.

Dan: Do you like the idea of each vender using their company name as 
part of the name of the character set?

Martin: What if a new company wants to use a new label? How to avoid 
collisions?

Dan: I will take the idea of using a short identifier, such as 
x-company name back to the VBWG.

Dan: Will this pass all the way through the W3C chain, or will we get 
push back.

Martin: It will probably be OK

Dan: Dan Connelly will likely push back.

Martin: Id try to sell it this way.

Dan: we would use and example using more than just the company name: 
x-company name optionally followed by more stuff.

Martin: I think the internationalization group will be OK with this.

Bottom line: If the VBWG agrees with this approach, then is approved by 
the internationalization group.

Go back to item 20:

Martin sent e-mail about this item:

Martin: only two examples:

(1) this is the base with everything in one language
(2) text is English, alt text is German, audio is German

Martin: Wants to indicate the language of the WAV file so that specific 
audiences can avoid certain languages.

Dan: We have never tried to do this in SSML. There is nothing that can 
be done to the file, so there is no need to indicate its language.

Richard: There is a more general situation. Assign a language to a large 
chunk of language and then have exceptions.

Dan: We could not think of any use cases for wrapping a voice file with 
a language.

Dan: When does the content of the description element need to be a 
different language from the audio element?

Martin: That would be a weird case.

Richard: Use XSL to pull all German files, possibly in a language 
training application.

Dan: You would like language indication on audio files.

Richard: yes

Dan: Use the voice element in SSML to do this.

Martin: Use XML:lang on the description element

Richard: SSML lesson for teach yourself language course. Create a 
smaller file with just a single file. Extract only the files for a 
specific file.

Dan: Is this an issue in SMIL?

Dan: Is this enforceable? There is no way to enforce developers putting 
a voice element around the audio file.

Richard: It should be optional.

General comments:

Dan: Item 44:  If someone uses something outside of the current language, it may 
not be supported. For example, an African click within English.

Dan: Item 1:  We dont want example in spec that most venders can not relate to. 
It is NOT that we dont want Hebrew and Arabic. Some languages need 
context in order to determine how the word is spoken. I.e. read.

We believe that we can likely complete these discussion in the next telecon.

Received on Sunday, 26 October 2003 09:57:06 UTC