David will argue that content metadata must survive language transformations to be of use in multilingual web. In order to achieve that goal, content creation and content langauge transformation related meta-data must be congruent, i.e. designed upfront with the transformation processes in mind. To make the point for XLIFF as the principal vehicle for critical metadata throughout multilingual transformations, it will be necessary to give a high level overview of XLIFF structure and functions, both in the current version and the next generation standard that is currently a major and exciting work in progress in the OASIS XLIFF TC.