Maintainig babel is important for (pdf)latex which is still in use but for XeLaTeX I would suggest polyglossia which already works.
I would add the new version of babel won't make things to work automagically. Rather it will provide some tools to ease making language files compatible with xetex and luatex. And to seize the opportunity... Please, could you give me examples of (minimal) documents with babel not working with XeTeX? Javier -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
