I strongly believe that we're currently in the early stage of the same cycle with localization formats. The most popular ones, like gettext, xliff, .properties

I strongly believe that we're currently in the early stage of the same cycle with localization formats. The most popular ones, like gettext, xliff, .properties are very limited, while the most sophisticated one - MessageFormat - is stopping a few steps short of having all needed capabilities and is very hard to read/write by hand. I'm very excited for the next 3-5 years where I believe we'll see more development in this field and hopefully we'll end up with a good equivalent of CSS for Web Localization. Full disclosure: I work on a project that my team believes to be a good contender for that - Project Fluent ( http://projectfluent.io/ http://projectfluent.io/ ) I also work within TC39 on ECMA402 on APIs that will make coming up with new localization APIs much easier (PluralRules API, language negotiation and selection etc.).