Gettext and ITS (was Re: Feature proposal: string extracting by RegExp for xgettext)

[Asgeir Frimannsson]

Hi Bruno,

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 9:41 PM, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hello Asgeir,
>
> > For example, for Glade XML files, the following ITS descriptor [2] can
> be
> > applied to extract/merge translatable features:
> >
> > <its:rules xmlns:its="http://www.w3.org/2005/11/its"; version="1.0">
> >  <!-- ITS rules for Glade 2.0, based on
> http://glade.gnome.org/glade-2.0.dtd -->
> >  <its:translateRule selector="/glade-interface" translate="no"/>
> >  <its:translateRule selector="//address@hidden'yes']"
> translate="yes"/>
> >  <its:translateRule selector="//atkaction/@description"
> translate="yes"/>
> >  <its:locNoteRule selector="//address@hidden'yes']"
> >   locNoteType="description" locNotePointer="@comments"/>
> > </its:rules>
>
> Thank you for posting this example! I had looked at the ITS specification,
> but not understood what it was really about and how it was meant to be
> used.
>

Note that this Glade example is an actual example used in the 'best
practices' document, not something I came up with :)

So if I understand it right, tools for extracting translatable strings and
> for merging back translated strings into XML documents could use this
> W3C ITS specification?


Yes, exactly. That is, for merging back you probably don't need it... But
imagine this combined with xgettext, e.g. for extracting stuff from odf
through xhtml and glade,ts... the absolute path for a translation unit could
be stored in the #: reference elem, for example
"/html/body/p[34]/table[3]/p" and be used as a locator when merging...
something like "xgettext --its=myconfig.its mydoc.xml".


>
> There is no free implementation of it right now?
>

There are a couple: http://www.w3.org/International/its/links.html

Rainbow (mono/.net) is LGPL, so is Spritser.


>
> An implementation of it would have to rely on XPath. For example, use
> libxml2.
> Right?


Yeah, the spec relies heavily on xpath expressions, libxml2 is excellent for
this.. It should be able to do a 'streaming' implementation, and just rely
on xpath for evaluating if the given node is translatable/inline/comment
etc, and not rely on loading the whole document into memory.

cheers,
asgeir