Overview

Several aspects need to be taken into account then processing CMS content that contains ITS 2.0 data categories. This page gathers these aspects and may be the basis for further guidance documents.

Express ITS data categories on the CMS level

ITS 1.0 operates at the level of a single document, with data categories applied to elements based on local ITS mark-up or (document-level) global ITS rules. Some degree of cross document scopeing can be achieved by several document referring to the same eternal file containing a set of ITS rules that then applies to all documents.

There may be a need for expressing the scope of ITS data categories at a CMS level, rather than a document level. This need arises due to:

• The use of stand-off data such as content tagging in CMS. These are presented along side the content, but are often store in specific database fields rather than content documents, and therefore cannot be addressed by ITS 1.0 scoping techniques
• The use of transclusion in CMS, where one document contains a reference to another such that the references document is included at a specific point in the referencing document on-demand, typically when a user accesses the referenced document. Ideally the referenced document is managed independently from the referencing document so that the former may be transcluded from multiple referencing documents. However, as ITS local markup and global rule to not scope across transclusion links, propagating rules from a referencing document to a referenced one requires both to include the same rules or to reference the same external rule file. This will obviously cause problems when a referenced document in transcluded from multiple referencing document with differing global rules.
• The use of structured grouping of documents on a CMS, where typically documents are grouped into folder for the convenience of managing them as a group. If such management related to applying MLW-LT semantics to all the documents in a folder using ITS 1.0 scoping would require editing each file to add the rule or a reference to a rule document, whereas associating the rule to the folder would provide a more convenient approach to this. The CMIS standard provides for associating properties with a folder, which would enable this. It also allows for associating properties with a document, which may enable ITS global rules to be associated with a file without having to modify the file itself.

Deadling with XHTML content and various ITS 2.0 local serializations

In XHTML, ITS 2.0 local markup can be expressed via its-* or via the ITS namespace, using e.g. the its:* prefix. Example of the variants: its-loc-note versus its:locNote. A rule of thumb is to use its:* for the XHTML syntax. This is expressed in the ITS 2.0 spec, see the note in Using ITS Markup in XHTML. In some cases using the its-* syntax also in HTML may be advisable, since this implies less transformations of the contents (from its-* to its:* or the other way round) in the CMS/client side. If the transformation cannot be avoided, a simple tooling is available.