Internationalization Tag Set
The Internationalization Tag Set is a set of attributes and elements designed to provide internationalization and localization support in XML documents.
The ITS specification identifies concepts which are important for internationalization and localization. It also defines implementations of these concepts through a set of elements and attributes grouped in the ITS namespace. XML developers can use this namespace to integrate internationalization features directly into their own XML schemas and documents.
Overview
ITS v1.0 includes seven data categories:- Translate: Defines what parts of a document are translatable or not.
- Localization Note: Provides alerts, hints, instructions, and other information to help the localizers or the translators.
- Terminology: Indicates parts of the documents that are terms and optionally pointers to information about these terms.
- Directionality: Indicates what type of display directionality should be applied to parts of the document.
- Ruby: Indicates what parts of the document should be displayed as ruby text..
- Language Information: Identifies the language of the different parts of the document.
- Elements Within Text: Indicates how elements should be treated with regard to linguistic segmentation.
ITS applies to both new document types as well as existing ones. It also applies to both markups without any internationalization features as well as the class of documents already supporting some internationalization or localization-related functions.
ITS can be specified using global rules and local rules.
- The global rules are expressed anywhere in the document, or even outside the document, using the
its:ruleselement. - The local rules are expressed by specialized attributes specified inside the document instance, at the location where they apply.
Examples
Translate data category
In the following ITS markup example, the elements and attributes with theits prefix are part of the ITS namespace. The its:rules element lists the different rules to apply to this file. There is one its:translateRule rule that indicates that any content inside the head element should not be translated.The
its:translate attributes used in some elements are utilised to override the global rule. Here, to make translatable the content of title and to make non-translatable the text "faux pas".Introduction
It would certainly be quite a faux
pas to start a dissertation on the origin of modern novel without
mentioning the
Localization Note data category
In the following ITS markup example, theits:locNote element specifies that any node corresponding to the XPath expression "//msg/data" has an associated note. The location of that note is expressed by the locNotePointer attribute, which holds a relative XPath expression pointing to the node where the note is, here ="../notes".Note also the use of the
its:translate attribute to mark the notes elements as non-translatable.Cannot find the file.
Invalid parameter.
ITS limitations
ITS does not have a solution to all XML internationalization and localization issues.One reason is that version 1.0 does not have data categories for everything. For example, there is currently no way to indicate a relation source/target in bilingual files where some parts of a document store the source text and some other parts the corresponding translation.
The other reason is that many aspects of internationalization cannot be resolved with a markup. They have to do with the design of the DTD or the schema itself. There are that are necessary to follow to make sure documents are correctly internationalized and easy to localize. For example, using attributes to store translatable text is a bad idea for many different reasons, but ITS cannot prevent an XML developer from making such choice.
Some of the ITS 1.0 limitations are being addressed in the version 2.0: See http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/ for more details.