[Sugar-devel] [Karma] i18n options

Bryan Berry bryan at olenepal.org
Tue Sep 8 04:29:27 EDT 2009 

I am procrastinating learning object-oriented javascript by thinking
about different i18n options for karma

Here are just a few of the key requirements for i18n in karma
1. Support inline text in the html  

	<div>This text should be captured</div>
2. Support in code translation 
	document.write(_("This text should be translate"));

This is pretty standard use of gnu gettext and is well-supported

3. Grab inline text with inline markup
	<div>This text should be captured, even the <strong>inline
markup</strong> </div>
4. Whatever solution we use, it shouldn't invalidate the html against an
html5 validator, as the suggested solution for XML in GNOME would 
http://www.gnome.org/~malcolm/i18n/marking-strings.html#xml


So I only see two possible solutions at this point

1) Using a client-side micro-template, similar to a server-side template

http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-micro-templating/

advantages: could be very powerful and very flexible

drawbacks: this could be slow and could invalidate the markup. It could
also make the markup hard to read. It could also cause problems
accessing karma lessons from web servers that mistake the <% ... %> as a
server-side include.

<div><% This text should be captured %></div>

2) using the data-* collection of author-defined attributes in html5

http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#custom-data-attribute

conceivably, we could add the attribute  data-k-translate="true"  to
every element we want translated

advantages: doesn't invalidate the html, makes use of html5

drawbacks: verbose, 
	might not be very flexible,
	we would have to add the attribute to a lot of elements

We could possibly use the attribute data-k-translate-children="true"  to
specify that all child elements w/ text should be translated.

Conceivably, we could also use data-k-translate-children="false" to turn
off translations for all children. I could also use

<html data-k-translate-children="false"> to turn off translations for
the entire document.

I haven't yet discussed i18n for the .css. In fact, I haven't really
thought hard about it. Ideas from smart folks would be much appreciated.

Regards,

-- 
Bryan W. Berry
Technology Director
OLE Nepal, http://www.olenepal.org

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