new localization framework - comments

[Posting this to multiple relevant newsgroups, followups to 
mozilla.dev.i18n, which is very low-traffic, so don't hesitate to 
subscribe to it if you're interested in this topic]


A few months ago, Axel Hecht from MoCo has worked on an idea for a new 
localization framework that could be used for Mozilla2, but also for web 
sites and other software.

The main goals of this framework are to overcome the problems and 
limitations we know that the current Mozilla dtd/properties model and 
the gettext/PO model have and provide not only a "best of both worlds" 
but also solve problem that currently exist with both, such as gender 
handling.

The current drafts of this are at <http://wiki.mozilla.org/L20n> on the 
Mozilla wiki, along with features, designs, examples and problems.

Axel did a talk on FOSDEM about this in February, see also 
<http://blog.mozilla.com/axel/2007/02/21/l20n-talk-slides-up/>, his 
slides were interesting, but his examples and demos left many questions 
open, confused some participants and reactions were split, esp. on the 
actual file format.

I think we never collected the real issues people were seeing with his 
proposals, so we should start collecting feedback, problems people are 
seeing, and good points about it here.

Also, a first try on an implementation (for and in PHP for trying out 
how the logic works) unfortunately stalled because of licensing 
questions, but I think we'd need an at least partially working 
implementation to work out the real problems of the spec - once we even 
arrive at a point where most people are content with a spec, actually.
We probably also need a first shot of a rough localization tool before 
we really know this all works out, IMHO.

Please post your (positive and negative) impressions about that 
framework here in this thread, I hope we can get the discussion going on 
this again and hopefully arrive at a usable spec and implementation 
following that discussion.

Robert Kaiser