Re: l10n architecture proposal available for comments

Gervase Markham wrote:
> Axel Hecht wrote:
>> I have posted a short intro to a l10n archicture proposal to my blog, 
>> please give it a read at 
>> http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2007/02/01/meet-pete/.
> 
> Axel: having read your proposal and looked at the code examples, I don't 
> quite see what this is _for_. It looks like a way of dynamically 
> localising web pages client-side, thereby making the client download the 
> text of every localisation! Which doesn't seem very useful to me, or 
> revelant to the Mozilla project.
> 
> What have I missed?

You missed that I'm using web apps for demos. Mostly because that way, I 
don't have to ship an extension, or custom builds or anything for people 
to look at how common problems can be solved. Both the problems and the 
proposed solutions don't differ from a web app to a installed local 
application. The target applications do include the Mozilla 
applications, and a good deal of the requirements come from our 
environment. But limiting the architecture to our platform will waste 
momentum. Not that I intend to own 15 implementations of this, surely not.

For the architecture, it doesn't really matter whether you load the 
locale files via http on demand, or use some php to process that server 
side, or pull it via the chrome protocol from a statically installed 
jar. Using web apps just chooses a platform for the prototypes that most 
people are happy to read.

That said, I expect web apps to pick up this technology first, as they 
have the least legacy infrastructure, or at least, have enough new 
projects taking off a week.

Moving all of the Mozilla apps over will require that we have solved the 
problems in localizing first, and then find out how to map the 
architecture into a implementation that works for us and plays nice for 
things like the xul cache and all the other bits.

Reading over the bits again, the target is in the very first paragraph 
on http://wiki.mozilla.org/L20n.

Axel