Fwd: Re: JobViewServer specification proposal

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Wednesday 09 April 2008, Ethan Osten wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-04-09 at 19:40 +0200, Rafael Fernández López wrote:
> > However I really agree this is for sure not the best solution. What other
> > alternatives we have assuring that they are cross-desktop ?
>
> Specify some file type, perhaps based on the same principle as desktop
> files, with allowance for translated versions. If a particular type

.. and a standardized location, though one could build on the XDG_*_DIRS for 
that with minimal effort.


> 	[Unit Type]
> 	Name=Unit
> 	Display=units
> 	Display[en_US][1]=unit

you'd probably want to reverse the []'d parts to leverage existing .desktop 
file localization code.

> 	etc.
>
> So that normally it would show up as "Application has X units," but
> "Application has 1 unit."

of course, there are languages with different numerical break points (e.g. 2, 
3, 10, 100, ..) for changes in plural phrases. this could quickly get a bit 
tricky =)

> This could obviously use some work; not every language would have the
> subject application at the beginning, 

that's easy enough by providing the full phrase with placeholders, e.g. "%1 
units".

in any case, this is functionally equivalent to providing the translations on 
the client side, is it not? so why bother with yet another corpus of files 
and just do the translations client side where the units aren't available in 
the spec. obviously this means less standardized texts (but common use cases 
can be folded into the spec over time ... still means we need a compatibility 
mechanism) and defining exactly what the use cases for these texts are 
(e.g. "will be shown in a progress meter") ... 

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Trolltech
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