Meta-localisation formats were specially designed to support the localisation process. They are resource formats, which can contain information on different resource formats and additional information. Some of the reasons for mixing resource formats are:
- Parallel use of different development environments, for example, resources in different resource formats (e.g. the case of the file format .po).
- Minimization of the number of different localisation formats in workflow, therefore meta formats (e.g. XLIFF) are used.