XLIFF Migration
Policy
Version Information:
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Version
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Date
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Author
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Description
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1.0
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11 June 02
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Tony Jewtushenko
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Initial Document
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1.01
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24 July 02
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Tony Jewtushenko
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Revisions based on 23 July 2002 TC
Meeting.
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1.02
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1 Aug 02
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Tony Jewtushenko
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Input from Mark Levins, Christian Lieske, and Gerard Cattin des Bois on cross-release compatibility. Removed
“WIP” references, and references specific to version numbers 1.0 / 1.1.
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Migration Policy:
Rules for Major vs. Minor releases:
Support for Existing Users:
Rules for Name Changes:
Impact of Migration on Users Organisations:
Cross-release Compatibility
Guidelines:
User Migration Assistance
Marketing, Public Relations and Education:
Rules for Major vs. Minor releases:
- The Technical
Committee will evaluate each individual release and classify it as “Major” or “Minor” release.
- As a
guideline, “Minor” releases:
- Shall
be comprised of small changes that would not require re-certification of
supporting tools or technologies
- Shall
deprecate but not remove any features present in the previous release.
- Shall
increment the version number to the right of the decimal point.
- As a guideline, “Major” releases
- May
be comprised of significant architectural changes that may require
re-certification of supporting tools and technology.
- May
delete features that were deprecated in previous releases.
- Shall
result in an increment to the version number to the left of the decimal
point.
- In general, a Minor
release will have stricter rules on changes than Major releases: Minor releases will usually be
comprised of small and superficial changes and bug fixes to an existing
specification rather than deep architectural changes which would typically
be implemented only for Major releases.
Support for Existing Users:
- Deprecated support
for changed elements, values or attribute names, at least until next Major
version number revision.
- Enumerated lists
are a potential issue if they are closed. Therefore, no lists will be closed if they existed as open
lists in a previous release.
Rules for Name Changes:
- Name
changes to required elements and attributes will be considered only if
semantics change.
Impact of
Migration on Users Organisations:
- Where
appropriate, the TC will audit food-chain migration and compliance issues
when deciding on architectural changes to a release. The “food chain” describes the
dependencies within related organization. For instance translators for a
localisation vendor company, localisation engineers for the publishing
company and software developers are all different point on the food chain,
and may be affected differently by different types of changes.
- Results
of such an audit may influence the TC’s release and migration strategy.
Cross-release
Compatibility Guidelines:
- Tools
designed to support Minor XLIFF releases should provide backward
compatibility for files that adhere to the same major release
specification. For instance, tools
that support version 1.1 files should be able to cope with 1.0
- Tools
designed to support XLIFF should not upgrade the version of a file without
either warning the user or requiring explicit UI or command line setting.
- For
files created with and complying to a later version of XLIFF, tools must
preserve unknown elements in that file.
- For
files created with and complying to a later version of XLIFF, tools must
not delete data that they do not understand.
User Migration Assistance
- A
Migration Policy Statement will be published as section of each
specification.
- A
Migration guidelines white paper will be authored and provided as a
deliverable of each release.
- A “Migration Support Kit” – containing
Whitepaper, Sample Files, and possibly sample XSLT’s - will be made available for download
at the XLIFF TC website.
Marketing, Public
Relations and Education:
- Formal Marketing, Public Relations, and
Education strategies and plans shall be devised as part of the rollout of
new releases.
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