W3C's Internationalization Tag Set, something to watch

Localizing applications (changing their user interface language into another language, among other things) can be difficult. For example, Visual Studio 2005 and C# let you set a Windows Forms' application form's Localizable property to true, and then work your way from there.

However, the problem becomes more difficult if you need to hand your application to be translated to another company, who are not software developers. They might not have Visual Studio, or might not know how to use it. In these situations, you might need to copy all text to an Excel spreadsheet, send it out, and then manually integrate the changes back. Additional issues like text that should not be translated (like URLs) can arise, unless the translation company is a good one.

W3C tries to address these issues with an XML based file format named Internationalization Tag Set (ITS), version 1.0. This is an interesting new specification, but I'd say there's still long way to go before this specification would work its way up to both .NET Framework and Visual Studio. But is is worth checking out, nonetheless.