RE: [xliff] XLIFF and Windows Resources

[Gerard Cattin des Bois <gcatt@windows.microsoft.com>]

Yves, 

A couple comments.

1. We have already defined an XML internal representation of all winres format, which we hope to move to XLIFF at some point. That is one of our longterm goal thru our involvement with XLIFF. This includes all the formats currently used by NT, Office, Visual Studio, and so forth. But it is not XLIFF compliant, although it is XML-compliant. It is currently proprietary, and has internal support in rc and mc compilers for it. No current plans to make it available to the general public. If the XLIFF standard committee or Unicode will create a winre xml standard representation, that could change things. What is the intent and direction there Yves?

2. The winres.htm file you submitted does not account for embedded mc data, where typically you #include your .mc files with their messages (for win32 apps running as a service to others). 

3. You recommend excluding XP. This is not a good idea since XP supports .net resources and now replaces the win9x home version of the os. By the time tools and businesses come to use any such xliff-formatted winres data, a great deal of the pc out there will be already running XP, which is an NT-light, rather than 9.x fatter and is a much better supported platform for Unicode application which can run natively on that platform.

Thanks, 
-Gérard 
Gérard Cattin des Bois 
Lead Program Manager, LocStudio Services 
Windows Productivity Tools Team 
gcatt@microsoft.com  (425) 706-1592
Symptom and sign of Inner Peace: An unmistakable ability to enjoy each moment...


-----Original Message-----
From: Yves Savourel [mailto:ysavourel@translate.com] 
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 9:43 AM
To: XLIFF list
Subject: [xliff] XLIFF and Windows Resources


Hi everyone,

At the Unicode conference last month, several of us (John R, Enda, Jaime,
etc.) decided start working on defining a common way to represent Windows resources in XLIFF, since we were all producing XLIFF documents from RC and/or Compiled files. This way any tool will be able to rely on the same representation regardless who did the extraction.

Since this may be of interest to more people, we thought it would be good to have that discussion in a thread of the mailing list.

John will soon (if not before this message) post a first document with some examples and descriptions, etc. The attached HTML file contains my notes after reading his document, as well as some additional concerns/notes/etc.

cheers
-yves