[openbeostranslationkit] Re: Structured Text Translation

First, I want to thank Andrew for submitting his ideas. This is certainly
a topic that should be discussed and examined by many people.

On Mon, 5 Aug 2002, Brian Matzon wrote:

|A basic translator is supposed to convert to and from the generic
|format. Our translator (as it relies on xslt) only have the ability to
|convert from generic to native - not from native to generic...
|
|How do we handle this? (ie. a PDF translator, should be able to convert
|PDF to our generic format, and from the generic to PDF).

I think we should decide what we want the user/Applications to be able to
do with the new Text Translation system and worry about the implementation
details after. There is so much that one can do with XML, HTML, PDF and
even plain text files that if we worry about implementation details now,
we might miss something important.

What might a user want to do with XML, HTML, PDF or plain text data? Do
they want to simply look at the end result? Would they rather see the
source code? Do they want to edit it, then save it as
the same type? Do they want to save the data as a table of database
records? Are they only interested in the pictures used in the document? If
there is scripting code embedded, do they want to be able to execute or
examine the code? Would they want to see a PDF document as plain text
data?

I think whatever we decide to do, we should try to make the OpenBeOS a
more desirable platform for developers and users. I want to ask questions
like "What is there a big need for?" and "What would be the most helpful."

I should be in the openbeostranslationkit channel soon, but I want to see
if there are any new jobs posted today first.

Later,

Michael Wilber

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