XLIFF Version 2.1 has reached an important milestone in its development. On October 14, the OASIS XLIFF TC members approved the first Committee Specification Draft and sent it immediately for the first public review. The OASIS Administration made the call for public comments on October 26, 2016. The first public review period will end on November 25, 2016.

The public review draft was extensively presented and discussed at the FEISGILTT workshop at LocWorld32 in Montreal last week.

The first “dot” release after XLIFF 2.0 delivers on the modularity promise of the XLIFF 2 architecture. XLIFF 2.1 defines two new namespaces and brings a full native ITS 2.0 capability via its ITS Module without breaking the backwards compatibility with XLIFF 2.0.

XLIFF 2 Core and 7 out of 8 XLIFF 2.0 Modules are unaffected by the 2.1 release. Apart from a major bugfix for the Change Tracking Module and the brand new ITS module, XLIFF 2.1 brings Advanced Validation capability. XLIFF 2.1 (and XLIFF 2.0 also) can be now 100% validated with standardized validation artifacts without regress to custom validation code. The expressivity of the validation framework was greatly enhanced by the usage of Schematron and NVDL schema languages on top of XML Schemas (xsd) that were available in XLIFF 2.0.

All comments from the wider community (those who are not members of the XLIFF TC) are collected through the XLIFF TC’s publicly archived comment list.

When posting a comment, please include the string “XLIFF 2.1 csprd01” in the subject line. You may want to number your comments if you’re sending a few of them, and the subject line should give an idea on what your comment is about.

Collected comments and the progress of their disposition are public and can be followed on the XLIFF TC JIRA project.

The XLIFF TC plans to have satisfactory dispositions for all comments by the end of November 2016, and approve the second public review draft by December 6, 2016.

For the progression of the standard from the Committee Specification stage to the Candidate OASIS Standard stage, early adopters within the TC and outside of the TC need to demonstrate implementability of the new standard by making public Statements of Use and posting those to the TC. Write to the TC comment list if you are interested in an early implementation and need advice.