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

[Martin Holmes]

I should add: a brief read-through of the new ITS 2.0 suggests to me 
that none of the objections we had to it have been obviated by the new 
version. Their purpose remains the same, and there's still no vertical 
directionality stuff.

Cheers,
Martin

On 14-03-07 07:06 AM, Martin Holmes wrote:
> 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
>
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>
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