When translating XML documents, the tools need to know various information about the format:

• Which elements and attributes are translatable.
• Which elements are inline (i.e. should be included within the text, like a <b> in XHTML).
• Which elements have a content that is preformatted.
• Whether any element has a content that needs to be treated with different rules (e.g. scripts).

Neither DTDs or XML schemas offer a mechanism to specify all this information, so each tool relies on proprietary parameter files (they have different name in each tool) for each XML format.

The Internationalization Tag Set (ITS), a W3C Recommendation, allows you to specify most of this information.

For more details and examples on ITS, see the ITS specification document.

ITS v1.0 does not cover all properties needed, but it is easily extended if necessary.