Foreword

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This document was prepared by OASIS (as XLIFF Version 2.1, February 2018) and drafted in accordance with its editorial rules. It was assigned to Technical Committee ISO/TC 37, Language and terminology, Subcommittee SC 5, Translation, interpreting and related technology, and adopted under the “fast-track procedure”.

This second edition cancels and replaces the first edition (ISO 21720:2017), which has been technically revised.

The main changes are as follows (see also Appendix C):

— Two major features are being added in XLIFF Version 2.1:
- — Advanced Validation methods;
- — Native Support for ITS 2.0.
— The Change Tracking Module was demoted to an extension to free hands of the TC and other implementers while working on a new version of the Change Tracking Module for XLIFF 2.2.
— A major bug fix was performed on the core xsd. The core xsd now enforces the xs:language data type on the srcLang and trgLang attributes. It was critical to make this fix, because -- as per OASIS policy -- validation artifacts would prevail over the prose provisions that are correct in both XLIFF 2.1 and XLIFF 2.0.
— Also an erroneously omitted Constraint of the xml:lang attribute on the <source> element has been added/restored in the normative text.
— Apart from the five (5) major changes mentioned above, numerous editorial bugfixes were made to secure greater clarity, either by fixing example errors or omissions, or by reorganizing normative content, so that the intent becomes clear and unequivocal at some troublesome places highlighted by XLIFF 2.0 implementers.
— Importantly, the TC decided to drop informative listings of the validation artifacts that had bloated the spec extent unnecessarily, were hard to keep in sync with the actual normative artifacts, while their actual usability proved rather limited -- readers who were able to read schema languages would not actually read them as printed listings and would anyways refer to the actual validation artifacts that are now referenced more prominently.

Any feedback or questions on this document should be directed to the user’s national standards body. A complete listing of these bodies can be found at www.iso.org/members.html.

BS ISO 21720:2024

XLIFF (XML Localization Interchange File Format)

Current

Published:

31 Jul 2024