Comment 6 for bug 298921

The world is full of different formats. If we even start to support all of them, we are going to run into a maintainance nightmare. If something can be easily transformed into PO files with external tools, we should let people do it themselves (each tool does it slightly differently, and has to make certain restrictions: I know that because I am an author of xml2po). For instance, GNOME uses xml2po for documentation, and KDE uses poxml (their own tool). Others probably use po4a. By blessing only one approach to translating documentation, we are going to limit our user base.

Also, I know there are a bunch of subtitle formats, and I don't see why and how we can decide to support one, and not the others. Writing a tool and maintaining it externally to transform them into PO files and back is much easier, and that's what I recommend as an approach. If you need help working on such a tool, we'd be happy to help.

Otherwise, Launchpad will become a resource hog, will have infinitely more bugs, and people will get worse impression of it. By concentrating on a single (or few) native formats, we can make sure we do absolutely the best job with them.