Other issues in the Registry section.

[macchiati]

I was looking at https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/pull/659/, but found a number of issues in the Registry section before the Default Registry. Capturing them here.

In the Conformance and Use:

The term 'registry' is being used ambiguously. That is, the distinction is not clearly enough drawn between the default registry, and the machine-readable format that is used by the default registry, but can also be used as implementations to provide machine-readable documentation/specification of their own registry, with additions to the default registry.

For example, "The MessageFormat 2.0 Registry was created to describe the core set of formatting and selection functions," seems really to be describing the default registry, not the registry format. So it should say "The MessageFormat 2.0 Default Registry"

In the next paragraph "The registry provides a machine-readable description" seems to be talking about the use as a format. It should have its own term, like 'registry format' (but doesn't have to be exactly that term).

I suggest that we don't have any 'naked' mentions of the word 'registry' in the spec, but rather qualify it to resolve the ambiguity.

Read-only options (the readonly attribute) can be displayed to translators in CAT tools, but may not be edited.

I think this is a mistake. I think the default should be read-only, and with only the (few) options that translators can modify being marked as "mutable" or some equivalent term.

validate their input with a regular expression (the validationRule attribute) Add: to some extent. Or some other qualifying phrase to indicate that they might be stricter than the regex.

The example needs to be fixed, eg to drop bogus lines like <!-- Since this applies to both cardinal and ordinal, all plural options are valid. --> and <match locales="en" values="one two few other" validationRule="anyNumber"/>

A localization engineer can then extend the registry by defining the following customRegistry.xml file.

We should add a note recommending that if the registry is available externally a namespace should be used to avoid collisions.

{$color :adjective article=indefinite accord=$object} BTW, this is probably a bad example. Some languages insert a word in front of 'color' to indicate definiteness, but others modify the noun.