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Goals and Non-Goals

This document defines the purpose of the Message Format Working Group (MFWG) and informs the decisions about the scope and the priorities of its efforts.

Goals

The primary task of the MFWG is to develop an industry standard for the representation of localizable dynamic message strings. A dynamic message string is a string whose content changes due to the value of or insertion of some data value or values.

The design goals are listed below.

  1. Allow users to write messages that are both grammatically correct and can be translated in a grammatically correct manner to languages that have different requirements. For example, providing a mechanism that uses CLDR's plural rules to select between various strings to use based on a numeric input value.

  2. Express formattable data, such as numbers, dates, currencies, or units, in a locale-appropriate way.

  3. Represent structured data alongside translations, such as markup.

  4. Be capable of localization roundtrip.

  5. Enable the creation of implementations, frameworks and tools building on top of the standard, manifesting different ideas and programming paradigms, and optimized for different uses and audiences.

Deliverables

  1. A formal definition of the canonical data model for representing localizable dynamic message strings.

  2. A formal definition of the canonical syntax for representing the data model, with well defined rules for handling text, special characters, escape sequences, whitespace, markup, as well as parsing errors.

  3. A specification for a one-to-one mapping between the data model and XLIFF. Note: not part of the LDML45 release.

  4. A specification for resolving messages at runtime, including runtime errors.

  5. A conformance test suite for parsing and formatting messages sufficient to ensure implementations can validate conformance to the specification(s) provided.

  6. A determination that there are at least two interoperable independent implementations compliant with the conformance test suite in order to demonstrate that the specification(s) are practical and meet requirements.

Non-Goals

The following is a list of potential goals which are explicitly excluded from the scope of the MFWG.

  1. Design a general interchange format for storing and transferring translations. Instead, ensure compatibility with the existing interchange formats.

  2. Support all grammatical features of all languages. Instead, focus on features most commonly encountered in user interfaces, textual, graphical and spoken ones alike.

  3. Create an automated engine capable of transforming parts of speech in a grammatically-correct fashion. Instead, allow interfacing with such automatic and non-automatic engines from within the data model.

  4. Build a framework for localizing software. Instead, design the standard as a building block to be used by third parties to create localization frameworks.