XLIFF and namespaces

[Richard Ishida <ishida@w3.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

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

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