Hi Andrew,
I'm looking forward to the discussions during the TC calls.
Meanwhile, maybe I can start by trying to provide a note on one of your thoughts:
> However, even that is problematic, because there is no way in
> XLIFF to correlate markup in the source with markup in the target.
I believe the id of each inline element would drive the correspondence between the source and the target.
It's how many translation tools work at a basic level. In fact there is no real need for much more than an id to handle inline codes in most use cases.
Cheers,
-ys