Proposal on how to move forward with ITS 2.0 support in XLIFF 2.1

[Felix Sasaki <felix@sasakiatcf.com>]

Hi all,

below are two proposals I want the TC to vote on, ideally during today’s call. 


1) Simplifying the ITS support writing in XLIFF

The ITS support in the XLIFF 2.1 draft currently follows the structure of the other XLIFF modules, e.g. separating the module definition from the elements and attributes definitions. I think that this makes both editing and reading overly complex. As an example, to read the support for the „Localization Quality Issue“ data category, one needs to read the data category section in the XLIFF spec, the module section, and also separate sections for all elements and attributes - which are a lot. In addition, there is a non-normative appendix explaining further aspects of ITS support in XLIFF.

I propose to vote in the TC for a simplified approach:

- Having one section about ITS with sub sections per data category
- Have for non normative aspects then non normative sub sections. By this I mean that we have for each ITS data category (see list below) a sub section. Even if the ITS module does not define anything normative for that data category , we would have one subsection describing why it is not supported. This makes the overall ITS support then very easy to read.

Before continuing any editing I would want the TC to vote on this, to avoid work that later needs to be re-written.


2) Remove everything from the draft which has no implementation commitment For many data categories is no implementation commitment. I suggest to remove such data categories and not invest time in editing for them. E.g. „localization quality rating“ has no implementer and is very complex, both in terms of writing and implementing. Removing this will save us a lot of time.

We would then end up having these data categories in the ITS module

- Translate
- Terminology
- Domain
- Text Analysis
- Provenance
- Preserve Space
- Localization Quality Issue
- MT Confidence
- Allowed Characters

Since the ITS spec is modular also in terms of conformance, there is no need to implement everything in XLIFF 2.1.

Best,

Felix