Re: [Taler] i18n

[Florian Dold]

Just for the record, Chrome extensions have their own system for i18n
[1], which will probably not be supported by WebExtensions.

It's also resource-based (as opposed to gettext-style), which some
developers might find less easy to use, and they have their own
non-standard format for messages [2].

- Florian

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/i18n
[2] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/i18n-messages

On 01/26/2016 04:26 PM, Florian Dold wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Gabor pointed me to some resources for JavaScript internationalization
> (i18n), I'll summarize how the situation looks to me here.
> 
> In general, there are two distinct flavors of i18 approaches:
> 
> 1. resource-based:  Most of today's larger (web) applications seem to
> use this.  The programmer never writes string constants directly, but
> always refers to a resource, like:
> 
> showDialog(getTranslation(MessageResources.Welcome, args))
> 
> This is more tedious for the programmer, but allows to use the
> MessageFormat [1] translation standard, which allows all kinds of fancy
> things (complex queries, support for gender, ...).
> 
> Enterprise-y frameworks like AngularJS follow this style as well [2].
> 
> 
> 2. gettext-style:  Programmers just write all strings that should be
> translated in their favorite language and mark then, usually via this
> underscore macro.  Some helper program then extracts the translatable
> string.
> 
> JavaScript has enough libraries to *read* .po/.mo files, but barely any
> support for extracting these strings from source.
> 
> However, it would be trivial(ish) to just use an off-the-shelf JS parser
> (esprima [3] is very good for that) to extract marked strings,
> preferably tagged template literals like:
> 
> i18n`This is a translated message.  Hello ${user}.`
> 
> Alternatively, we'd just have to hack together our own message catalogue
> for gettext by grepping the source code in the beginning.
> 
> 
> Does anybody have more experience with i18n in JavaScript projects?
> 
> Do we want to do gettext or resource-based translations?
> 
> Personally as a developer I'd prefer gettext-style, but in the end I
> wouldn't mind either too much.
> 
> - Florian
> 
> 
> [1] http://userguide.icu-project.org/formatparse/messages
> [2] https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/i18n
> [3] http://esprima.org/
> [4] https://github.com/gmarty/xgettext
>

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