"Subsetting/restricting" the XLIFF XSD

["Lieske, Christian" <christian.lieske@sap.com>]

Title: "Subsetting/restricting" the XLIFF XSD

Dear all,

Quite often I stumble across statements like the following:

        I cannot support full-blown XLIFF, and actually I don't want
        to since my application does not need all of XLIFF.

        A "reformat" activity for example is not needed in my environment.
        Accordingly, the XLIFF features which support reformatting do
        will not or actually should not be used in my environment.

One of the interesting questions which usually surface next is the
following:

        How can I easily find out whether the XLIFF which is thrown
        at me is the one which I can process?

So far, I have seen two approaches for dealing with this:

        a. build your own parser
        b. modify the XLIFF XSD (through for example out
                the reformat stuff) and use a standard XML parser

Both approaches have for example the drawback that it is kind of hard
to keep in sync with possible changes to the XLIFF XSD. I am thus
wondering, which other approaches exist.

One alternative approach which has entered my mind, relates to mechanisms
offered by XSD itself. To be specific, I was wondering inhowfar for example
"redefine" or substitution groups could be used.

Any experiences/opiniones out there?

Cheers,
Christian