Resource bundles are usually stored in property files. However, as property files are plain files, issues with the encoding of the file may arise. The XML resource bundle format has been developed to provide an alternative to property files.
- The XML format declares the encoding of the file. This avoids use of the
native2ASCIIprogram which can interfere with encoding. - Property files generally use
ISO 8859-1character encoding which does not cover the full unicode charset. As a result, languages such as Arabic would not be natively supported. - Tooling for XML files is better supported than the tooling for Java property files and thus the XML editor copes well with the file encoding.