2006-02-22: The Internationalization Tag Set Working Group has published an updated Working Draft of the Internationalization Tag Set (ITS). Organized by data categories, this set of elements and attributes supports the internationalization and localization of schemas and documents. Implementations are provided for DTDs, XML Schema and Relax NG, and for existing vocabularies like XHTML, DocBook and OpenDocument. Visit the Internationalization home page.
(Copied from the W3C News Archive)
I had missed the previous version of this document and I have been very impressed and pleased while (quickly) reading it.
Among the good things, I’d mention:
- Flexibility: ITS can be used within the documents to localize, within the schemas that describe these documents or standalone.
- Schema agnosticism: ITS can be used with DTDs, W3C XML Schema and RELAX NG (I don’t see why the list has been limited to these three ones, but, at least, RELAX NG is explicitly mentioned).
- No QNames: more precisely, ITS has been wide enough to avoid using namespace declarations for its QNames.
Among the things that could be improved, I have found (and reported):
- The word « tag » in name itself: « Internationalization Tag Set »: we spend our time to explain that XML is about trees and that tags are only syntactic sugar to mark the beginning and the end of elements and I wouldn’t have expected to see this word in the name of a W3C specification! [bug 2922]
- The fact that the same element names are used in schemas and instance documents: schemas with XML syntaxes are also instances and ITS could be used to localize the schemas themselves instead of localizing the instances described by these schemas. Unfortunately, doing so would lead to a confusion since the ITS element names would be the same for both usages [bug 2923]
- The list of schema languages could be left open [bug 2924]