[tei-council] Clarifying the situation re ITS and text directionality

[Martin Holmes]

I wasn't very coherent this morning about the reasons we rejected ITS. 
Apologies for that -- it's very early in the morning at the end of a 
long week.

We did look in detail at the ITS specification. Our workgroup page reports:

"We agree that the ITS specification is rather a red herring. Its 
primary concern is translation rather than text representation, and its 
provisions for directionality are sparse. "

This is a rather brief report on a longer discussion. The point about 
ITS is that its focus is the creation and maintenance of documents for 
the purposes of translation. It's "designed to foster the automated 
creation and processing of multilingual Web content". That's not what 
our text directionality proposal is focused on at all; we're trying to 
provide useful guidelines based on existing specifications that enable 
the encoding of documents containing potentially complex combinations of 
nested directionality features.

In addition, ITS covers ONLY left-to-right and right-to-left, and our 
mandate was to deal with vertical directionality as well. Even in the 
case of ltr-rtl, the ITS analysis is relatively superficial compared 
with the sophistication of the CSS Writing Modes and CSS Transforms 
modules, which are much richer. In addition, in order to use the CSS 
attributes, no changes need to be made to the TEI schema; we don't need 
to add elements from any other namespace, because it's all done with 
@style/@rendition/<rendition>.

Cheers,
Martin