[sw-l] SWML questions and comments

Wed Oct 13 13:18:15 UTC 2004

Hiya Hope! (it is Hope, isn't it?)

This is really good work - I think you're going in the right direction for
the shape of future SW websites.

While you're getting into this, here's a challenge you might like to think
about.

One of the weaknesses of pulling signs from dictionaries is that many signs
have a continuous range of meanings. For example the British Sign Language
sign for 'child' has a usual form where the hand is held at about hip level,
but the height of the hand may be varied to indicate the age (or at any
rate, height) of the child. See the attached gif for an illustration of this
(though the adult sign needs a bit of extra modification so might be best
expressed as a separate dictionary entry).

Since the SWML contains information about the position of each symbol in the
sign, would it be possible to apply a transformation which will allow the
envisaged height of the child to be applied?

Perhaps it would be necessary to add range information to the SWML for this?
For example, specifying the maximum and minimum heights of the handshape
symbol. It makes the SWML a little more complicated but maybe it beats
filling up dictionaries with a multitude of signs to cover all variations of
each sign.

Some other examples of signs like this in BSL are "pregnant" (expressing the
term of pregnancy), grow-up (which can be signed like "eight grow-up twelve"
meaning "between the ages of eight and twelve", and many other obvious ones
such as "box" (which can indicate boxes of different sizes) etc.

What do you think? Too far-fetched, food for thought, or a piece of cake?

Sandy

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
> [mailto:owner-sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu]On Behalf Of Signuno
> Sent: 13 October 2004 11:24
> To: sw-l at majordomo.valenciacc.edu
> Subject: [sw-l] SWML questions and comments
>
>
> Dear signwriting list (and blind cc to w3
> international),
>
> Earlier I explained about how
> http://www.geocities.com/signuno/signoskriben.js
> converts simple HTML with glosses into SW images.
>
> Now I just wrote
> http://www.geocities.com/signuno/signoskriben.xml
> which is XSLT to convert SWML(-S?) into SW images.
> It's my first ever XSLT :-)
>
> So I wrote a simple SWML(-S?) page at
> http://www.geocities.com/signuno/swml_kontrolo.xml
> and when I surf to it with a very modern good browser
> (Explorer for example) it displays fine!
>
>
> Okay, some questions and comments.  What's the
> difference between SWML and SWML-S, and why the funny
> version S-1.0 instead of 1.0?  Is the DTD at
> http://swml.ucpel.tche.br/ the most recent?
>
> Using encoding="ISO-8859-1" is deprecated style,
> encoding="UTF-8" is to be recommended.
>
> > > <?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1" ?>
> > >   <swml version="s-1.0" language="asl"
> > tranlation="english">
>
> language="asl" - should that be lang="SGN-US", or
> signlang="SGN-US", or maybe xml:lang="SGN-US"?
> Language is like javascript, lang is human language I
> think.  I guess we've decided on the Everson codes
> (I'm still waiting on a reply about SGN-EO versus
> SGN-epo versus SGN-signuno).
>
> What's translation="english" - is that the language of
> the glosses - should it be translation="en-US", or
> maybe glosslang="en-US"?  The signs could be ASL, and
> the glosses French, yes?
>
> <sign gloss="good?"> is okay for English, but if the
> gloss is in Japanese with RUBY or Arabic with BIDI,
> the SWML will be broken.  You need:
> <sign><gloss>good?</gloss>
>
> You should also allow the glosses to be multilingual:
> <sign><gloss xml:lang="en">good?</gloss><gloss
> xml:lang="fr">bon?</gloss><gloss
> xml:lang="eo">bona?</gloss>
>
> Thanks for listening to my ideas,
> "Signuno".
>
>
>
> > >     <sign gloss="good?">
> > >       <symbol x="8"
> > y="24">01-05-011-01-01-01</symbol>
> > >       <symbol x="5"
> > y="0">03-01-001-01-01-01</symbol>
> > >       <symbol x="27"
> > y="36">02-05-001-01-01-01</symbol>
> > >       <symbol x="4"
> > y="64">08-04-006-01-01-01</symbol>
> > >       <symbol x="24"
> > y="16">08-01-001-01-01-01</symbol>
> > >     </sign>
> > >   </swml>
>
> See also
> http://w3.org/International/
> http://signwriting.org/
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/sw-l.html
> http://www.evertype.com/standards/iso639/iana-lang-assignments.html
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Vous manquez d’espace pour stocker vos mails ?
> Yahoo! Mail vous offre GRATUITEMENT 100 Mo !
> Créez votre Yahoo! Mail sur http://fr.benefits.yahoo.com/
>
> Le nouveau Yahoo! Messenger est arrivé ! Découvrez toutes les
> nouveautés pour dialoguer instantanément avec vos amis. A
> télécharger gratuitement sur http://fr.messenger.yahoo.com
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: child.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 1735 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/sw-l/attachments/20041013/2a3c0e03/attachment.gif>