Add ITS Rule file

From W3C XForms Group Wiki (Public)

Original post from YvesSavourel:


Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:33:07 +0200
To: www-forms-editor@w3.org
Subject: ITS Rule file
From: "Yves Savourel" <ysavourel@translate.com>

--- 1) Is the WG planning to provide an ITS Rule file along with the  
specification (e.g. as a non-normative appendix)?

[[ Just in case if you are not familiar with ITS: It is a Proposed  
Recommendation (planning to go as Recommendation next week) that
define a set of elements and attributes that provide "read-to-go"  
internationalization features. See also: http://www.w3.org/TR/its/
]]

For instance, when I look at the second XML code sample in section 2.1, I  
see several elements containing text: <label> and <value>.
Most, if not all, localization tools, as well as ITS, assume element  
content is translatable. However in this case I'm guessing that
<value>Cash</Cash> is not.

While this is fine because tools have ways to specify an element should  
not be translated, it is very often quite difficult no know
*which elements* is like that. Having a list of elements that are  
non-translatable (or conversely if there are more non-translatable
than translatable elements) would help a lot.

This list could be expressed using ITS rules. This way all user of  
translation tools (or other language-related applications such as
spell-checker, machine-translation engines, etc) could look up that set of  
rules and process accordingly. In this example it would
be as simple as:

<its:rules xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its" version="1.0">
  <its:translateRule selector="//value" translate="no"/>
</its:rules>