Comments about SSML from ITS WG

Hello,

ITS WG reviewed SSML 1.1 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/) from 
perspective of suitability for internationalization and localization.

We would appreciate if you can incorporate our feedback into SSML.

SSML should allow usage of ITS markup (http://www.w3.org/TR/its/), 
because SSML documents contain natural text with speech markup and as 
such it is very likely that they can be translated.

SSML currently doesn't provide direct support for ITS and has limited 
extensibility which prevents using ITS (see below).

Problem 1:
==========

Section 2.2.3 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/#S2.2.3) 
allows usage of foreign elements inside SSML documents. Thus it is 
legitimate to use elements like its:rules or its:ruby in SSML documents.

However specification doesn't explicitly allow to use foreign 
attributes. This means that it is not possible to use local ITS 
attributes like its:translate.

Solution 1:
===========

SSML should allow foreign attributes on any SSML element. Ideally such 
possibility will not be mentioned only in prose of spec, but also XML 
schema will specify this using xs:anyAttribute (and similarly by xs:any 
for elements).

Problem 2:
==========

Element sub have attribute alias 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-speech-synthesis11-20080620/#S3.1.11) 
which contains text for pronuncation. However it is not possible to 
attach any ITS category to single attribute. Moreover using attributes 
for natural language text is against XML I18N BP 
(http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/NOTE-xml-i18n-bp-20080213/#DevAttributes). 
Using subelement for alias will be better solution.

Solution 2:
===========

Use alias subelement instead of attribute.

Regards,

				Jirka Kosek
				on behalf of ITS WG

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------
   Jirka Kosek      e-mail: jirka@kosek.cz      http://xmlguru.cz
------------------------------------------------------------------
        Professional XML consulting and training services
   DocBook customization, custom XSLT/XSL-FO document processing
------------------------------------------------------------------
  OASIS DocBook TC member, W3C Invited Expert, ISO JTC1/SC34 member
------------------------------------------------------------------