Steven, This is very useful :) I see what you mean about inline tags - so for e.g. (probably a poor one at that): Nominative: t('I am of the <em>opinion</em> that..'); Dative: t('<em>Methinks</em> that ..'); So, using tags outside the t() here would break the translation or make it kludgy. Is that right? And the use of the <p> tags are a lot more subjective, with some passages better off with the <p> tags embedded, thereby providing a little flexibility to the translator? Please confirm when you can. And thanks for taking the time to write this up :) Cheers, -K
Not at all. The main rule is to avoid markup in translatable strings, unless it would split up text that needs to be together for proper translation. Unfortunately there are some cases where people disagree.
What everyone happily agrees on is links: bad: t("You may change permissions on the %accesscontrol page.") with %accesscontrol => l(t('access control'), 'admin/access', ...). good: t("You may change permissions on the <a href="%url">access control</a> page.") with %url => url('admin/access');
The link caption is part of the sentence, so it should be translated along with it. In some languages, the page title 'access control' would be in a nominative, while "on the access control page" would be in a dative (or equivalent).
The same rule applies to similar short inline elements, like <strong> or <code>.
For block level elements where the inside is a stand-alone string, there is also no debate: bad: t('<h2>Some title</h2>'); good: '<h2>'. t('Some title') .'</h2>';
The help texts are a different story. An important point is whether different paragraphs of a help text belong together in one t(...) or not. If they do, then the '<p>' tags must be part of the translatable string (otherwise it would contain unmatched '</p><p>' inside it). If they don't, each paragraph can have its own '<p>'. t(...) .'</p>' call.
But unless I'm mistaken, Stefan's proposal a while ago was not just about moving the '<p>' outside the t() but also out of hook_help() and into the theme. This is a different issue and it was rejected because of multi-paragraph help; it would have to contain unmatched '</p><p>' as well.
Steven Wittens