Re: [dita] W3C Draft: Best Practices for XML Internationalization

"Grosso, Paul" <> wrote
on 02/07/2007 11:33:25 PM:

> A W3C working draft document entitled "Best Practices 

> for XML Internationalization" was published last week.

> 

> It includes a section on DITA at

> http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-xml-i18n-bp-20070628/#dita

> 

> paul

Curious.  It gives some advice
on how to handle Ruby, which DITA probably needs a domain for sooner or
later.

There are a few errors/omissions with
respect to their coverage of DITA:

- The XPath selectors are all of the
form "//term" rather than "//*[contains(@class, ' topic/term
')]".  Selectors appear to be able to use all XPath 1.0 patterns,
so they should Do The DITA Thing with element names and classes.

- There's no mention of incorporating
the domain into DITA maps, which can have translatable text.

- It doesn't look like much attention
has been given to is-a relationships and overrides (i.e., <step>
is-a <li>).  But, looking at the spec for ITS, the override
logic for <its:rules> isn't sophisticated enough to cope with mixing-in
of DITA domain specializations anyway.  Darn.

Thanks for alerting us to this, Paul.
 It's nice to see DITA hit the big time.

-- 

Deborah Pickett