FW: Heartsome' XLIFF Editor

["Yves Savourel" <ysavourel@translate.com>]

Here is some notes about XLFEdit, the XLIFF Editor from Heartsome.
It didn't go through the first time I sent it.

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To: <tech@heartsome.net>
Cc: <xliff-comment@lists.oasis-open.org>
Subject: XLIFF Editor
Date: Fri, 20 Jun 2003 21:22:10 -0600
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Dear XLFEdit developers,

I've downloaded your XLIFF Editor application
(http://www.heartsome.net:9080/xmlstyler.jsp?lang=EN&XML=download.xml
and started to use it a little bit. It's a nice tool and I hope you will
continue its development. Here are some of the few main problems I've
noticed:


1- The XLIFF document does not open if the target-language attribute is
not present. However the specification have target-language as an
optional attribute.

2- A show-stopper is the fact that the values for resname in
<trans-unit> are changed by the tool (the ones in <group> are left
untouched as they should). In <trans-unit> they are renamed 'res1',
'res2', etc. As resname is an important parameter because many XLIFF
filters and tools rely on it for various tasks (comparison, leverage,
merging, etc.) such change makes a document saved with XLFEdit useless
in many situations.

3- Target text for alternate translation is not shown if the value of
the xml:lang attribute is different in casing from the target-language
value. For example if <target xml:lang='fr'> in <atl-trans> and <file
target-language="FR"> the alternate translation won't show up. The
xml:lang attribute is supposed to be not case-sensitive (RFC-3066), it's
an exception in XML.

4- Target text for alternate translation is shown only if the value of
the xml:lang attribute is exactly the same as for the target-language
value. For example a target set to 'fr-ca' in a file with a
target-language set to 'fr-fr' will not show up. It's sad, since
alternate translations could be in other locales than the target
language (leveraging French-France translation for French-Canadian for
instance).

5- When opening a file, the proposed extensions are: .xml and .xlif but
not .xlf, which is the recommended XLIFF extension.

6- The attribute translate is ignored. This is sad, since there are many
files that have translation units with translate set to 'no'. This is
used to carry reference text around translatable text (or because those
segments had to be extracted for whatever reason, but should not be
touched).

7- The download page states version 1.0.1, but the downloaded
application shows as version 0.1.0.

8- Literal text that looks like attributes is modified by the tool, and
treated like inline code. For example the segment "Use the tags &lt;b>
and &lt;/b> to mark a text in bold" will have the two text chunks "<b>"
and "</b>" treated as if there were actual codes.


Thanks for this nice tool. I'm looking forward to see the next version.

Kind regards,
-yves