Fwd: [xliff-comment] XLIFF and namespaces

For what it's worth, I just sent this email to the XLIFF mailing list. 
They are about to take a second vote (on Tuesday, I believe) about how 
to move forward with XLIFF 2.0.

The options are:

1. to disallow namespace extensions altogether (because of previous 
abuse where people used their own namespace markup to do things that are 
core features in XLIFF)

2. to allow namespaces (but make it clear that overwriting core XLIFF 
features with namespaces MUST NOT be done), but also allow special XLIFF 
tags that can be used for extensibility.

The voting was evenly split last time, and looks close again this time.

RI



Richard Ishida
Internationalization Activity Lead
W3C (World Wide Web Consortium)

http://www.w3.org/International/
http://rishida.net/


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [xliff-comment] XLIFF and namespaces
Date: Fri, 15 Jun 2012 17:13:02 +0100
From: Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.org>
To: xliff-comment@lists.oasis-open.org

Dear XLIFF TC,

I would like to add my voice to the concern that the XLIFF TC is
considering an option to specify extensibility for XLIFF 2.0 in a manner
that might would completely disallow the use of namespaces.

I recommend that you consider fixing the problem by dealing directly
with the abuse rather than removing the opportunity to use namespaces,
ie. by disallowing use of namespace attributes to overwrite core XLIFF
features.

The W3C MultilingualWeb-LT Working Group is currently defining
additional extensions to ITS.  XLIFF and ITS need to be closely aligned
as we go forward, since ITS aims to ensure that the information that
needs to be stored in XLIFF is supplied by content developers.

It seems to me that not only will the disallowing of namespaces impact
backwards compatibility, but it may well significantly impact the speed
at which the advantages of ITS can be applied to the localization
process through XLIFF in the future.

Best regards.
RI

Received on Friday, 15 June 2012 17:39:28 UTC