Localization - a proposal

Dear all,

With Nico we just had a long IRC brainstorming about how to do 
localization support in Aida. Here is the proposal:

	e addText: #fr->'Salut'

So, all texts are added as associations with initial language as a key 
and text in that language as value. Such association then implies that 
this text can be later shown in many languages as soon as translations 
are provided.

And how will translations be done?

In two ways: in-line directly on the web page or in special web app with 
the translation table. In-line will be preferable for translators, 
because they will see the complete context in which the text resides.

Scope of i18 texts:

Question is how to do translations of apps wich are usually made of 
reusable web elements/components. Shall we provide some global message 
catalog as is in case of GetText? Such a global catalog is hard to 
maintain if there is a lot of text. But it avoids duplicates. Our 
proposal is not to have global but a local message catalogs, one per 
each element generating method in WebComponent/WebApp.   Yes, there will 
be a lot of duplication of translations that way but this is still much 
simpler to translate and maintain than some global catalog. Also keep in 
mind that we translate reusable components, which will reduce duplicate 
translation work at the end.

Where are translations stored?

By default directly in class methods of each WebApp or WebComponent 
subclass in a protocol 'translations'. This approach is similar to 
method images, that is images directly in methods and have the same 
advantages - translations can be stored together with the code in 
version systems. Later we can add some WebTranslations class (like 
WebStyle).

That's it, a proposal, now it is turn on you for comments.

Janko

--

-- 
Janko Mivšek
AIDA/Web
Smalltalk Web Application Server
http://www.aidaweb.si
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