What are the guidelines to create XML document types that will be easier to localize?
The W3C ITS Working Group is working to produce such guidelines. Some of the main aspects of the guidelines are the following: • Avoid to use attributes for translatable data. • Provide a way to specify the language of your elements, and use xml:lang for this. • Provide specific elements to delimit content that is coming from an external source (e.g. error messages or prompts from a resource file). • Provide a mechanism of IDs for translatable elements. • When naming your elements think about what is there purpose, not how you imagine the rendering of their content. For example: if an element is used to emphasis a text run call it
