[xliff-tools] PO Representation Guide: The PO Header

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

Hi all,

I'm working on cleaning up the guide, and need some help on handling the PO 
header.

The only field I can see possibly belonging in the XLIFF file is 
Project-Id-Version, which can be split up to represent the product-name and 
product-version attributes of the <file> element. But I don't think we should 
put a restriction on this and put it in the guide, as some localisation 
processes might want other values in these fields.

Rather, I would like to see the whole header abstracted and put in the 
skeleton. This causes problems when converting POT files, having to manually 
edit headers after translation but I can't see a better solution (other than 
e.g. building more logic into filter implementations to auto-modify headers)

Further, how to represent a PO header or any other information in the skeleton 
should be totally implementation dependent, and not defined in the guide.

Implementations would need to take care when converting PO files though, as 
the character set is specified in a header field. But filters should be able 
to deal with that by a) imposing restrictions on character sets (e.g. utf-8 
only), or b) parsing the charset field of the header and do the conversion to 
the XML character set, or c) manually specify the PO character set on 
conversion.

Any comments?

cheers,
asgeir