Issue status update for http://drupal.org/node/26139 Post a follow up: http://drupal.org/project/comments/add/26139 Project: Drupal Version: cvs Component: other Category: tasks Priority: normal Assigned to: Robin Monks Reported by: Robin Monks Updated by: Dries Status: patch (code needs review) m3avrck: try to be more specific! What does 'looks good to me' mean? Does it mean you carefully studied and proof-read all changes, or that you merely skimmed over it. The former is helpful, the latter is not. Dries Previous comments: ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 00:02:17 +0000 : Robin Monks Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/4-6-2-helptext.patch (126.02 KB) This patch adds help text to all core modules per the information at http://drupal.org/node/24768. This patch should be applied to 4.6.x and CVS HEAD. Robin +1: No broken links. Easy access to core module help is going to make Drupal much more accessible / lower the learning curve. Andrew ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 05:40:04 +0000 : Dries Quick review: 1. We don't glue words together: %administerprofile should be %administer-profile, %administerwatchdogevents should be %administer-watchdog-events, etc. 2. We try not to abbreviate words: %stats should be %statistics. 3. We don't use spaces in a href-tags! Wrong: <a href = "%foo" title = "my foo">Good: <a href="%foo" title="my foo"%gt; 4. Why has this line been added: error_reporting(E_ERROR | E_PARSE);? 5. You can't write "administer >> menus >> add menu" without escaping the >>'s. In results in invalid XHTML. 6. Writing "administer >> menus >> add menu" is dangerous because these paths are dynamic (eg. they can be changed using the menu module). I guess it is uncommon though. 7. You changed settings.php. 8. We should avoid using the word "node" in user-level documentation. We try to use "post" or "content". 9. Some title-attributes of the a href-tag start with a capital letter, some with a small letter. Most title-attribute are useless; they don't add any value. In fact, they are often less descriptive than the content enclosed in the a href-tag. At least *90%* of all title-attributes can be *removed*! Examples: <a href = "cron.php" title = "cron page">cron page</a> (redundant title) <a href = "%adminsettings" title = "">administer >> settings</a> (empty title) <a href = "%addavocabulary" title = "add a vocabulary">administer >> taxonomy >> add vocabulary</a> (useless title) <a href = "%administertaxonomy" title = "administer taxonomy">administer >> taxonomy</a> (useless title) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 05:45:07 +0000 : Dries Also, the patch only applies partially against HEAD. 6 modules don't get updated. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 06:34:05 +0000 : Amazon Quick review: 1. We don't glue words together: %administerprofile should be %administer-profile, %administerwatchdogevents should be %administer-watchdog-events, etc. Ok, we can change that. 2. We try not to abbreviate words: %stats should be %statistics. Ok, I'll change the Drupal handbook source for this. 3. We don't use spaces in a href-tags! Wrong: Good:
menus >> add menu" without escaping the >>'s. In results in invalid XHTML.
Ok, we will escape the 's. That is a mistake. 6. Writing "administer >> menus >> add menu" is dangerous because these paths are dynamic (eg. they can be changed using the menu module). I guess it is uncommon though. Admin help is for the new users who are most likely to be using the navigation menu. The barrier of adapting new user documentation is too high for a fully dynamic system. Could you suggest some phrasing that acceptable? In the navigation menu: administer >> menus >> add menu. But even that is subject to change. Please advise. 7. You changed settings.php. We will fix that. 8. We should avoid using the word "node" in user-level documentation. We try to use "post" or "content". Ok, we will remove the word node and use post instead. 9. Some title-attributes of the a href-tag start with a capital letter, some with a small letter. Most title-attribute are useless; they don't add any value. In fact, they are often less descriptive than the content enclosed in the a href-tag. At least 90% of all title-attributes can be removed! We were told to add titles for accessibility reasons. If this is not the case we can remove them. Examples: cron page (redundant title) redundant, but harmful? administer >> settings (empty title) Ok, we will find all the empty titles and either remove them or populate them with appropriate titles. administer >> taxonomy >> add vocabulary (useless title) The user base is changing. Simple english phrases are more meaningful to new users. I believe it's a mistake to overlook what is simple to the advanced user, but valuable to the new user. administer >> taxonomy (useless title) Again, a simple phrase while seemingly redundant to advanced users who are not intimidated by symbols such as >> can be helpful to new users, and those who rely on titles for accessibility. The hope was that themes that supported mouse over text would benefit over time as the documentation improved. However, it's a minor point and we can strip it away all the titles if it doesn't conform to Drupal guidelines and standards. I'd prefer to allow the documentation to evolve with more descriptive titles over time as documentation contributions increase. We will aim to have a new patch meeting the points highlighted above in approximately the next 12 hours. We will also apply the same standards to the 30 contributed modules. Thanks for the quick evaluation. It's greatly appreciated. Cheers, Kieran ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:32:38 +0000 : Goba Forum.module, locale.module, drupal.module etc. patches include some HTML errors, starting a new paragraph, then immediately starting another one. It might be a good idea to validate the HTML sources of the helps so random fixes in the future will not give more job to the translators. You can do this with extracting the po files, and examinging the files extracted. It is possible that given a standard HTML enclosure (html, head, body) the pot files will validate as XHTML, I never actually tried large scale help text validation. There are also other HTML validity problems in the search module patch (unclosed list item tag). There might be others elsewhere. It might also be a good idea to automatically spell check the strings (as it was done with the dev comments before), so that it is less likely that these need modification later. Keep in mind that translating all this stuff takes quite a bit of time (this is why these are not translated in some cases), so it would be good to do the best for the first time (which is your intention anyway :). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:38:43 +0000 : killes@www.drop.org I think it would be nice if the help texts could be split up in one t()ed string per paragraph. That way they are much more likely to be at least partially translated by translators. Also, you can then leave the paragraph tags out from the t()ed strings and have a bit less html in those. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 13:50:53 +0000 : Goba As a practicioning translator, and as the one who translated most of the long help texts in the complete Hungarian translation (and will do the updates :), I say having the text flow intact is more important then "helping" translators with breaking up text in smaller chunks. Having big chunks ensure that: * That the string will not show up in the locale cache (because of their size), and will not slow down pages. * It is easier to translate the complete texts, as you know you need to use the very same terminology around, and will not use random different translations, and you will also refrain from repeating the same "language salt", thus leading to quality translations * Users of Drupal will not be faced with half translated help chunks (which is especially funny, if the middle of some English text is translated). By the way, Drupal used to have per paragraph t(), but then changed to use one t(), which optimises database queries, and given the above I think it is better for the user and translator too. Just my two cents... ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 14:16:51 +0000 : killes@www.drop.org Goba, I knew you would answer like that. ;) I think that the single paragraphs are sufficiently selfcontained to translate them in pieces. I have looked at the aggregator help as an example. You yourself are a kind of an übertranslator who'd also translate the whole bible in one PO chunk. ;) So I think we should look at other translations, too. I am using a very nice PO editor, but I know that I will never translate chunks of text that are more than two or threee sentence long. It takes too much time. But if I can split it up, I might translate the small pieces one by one. And I'd also be sure that I do not have to change everything just because a typo was fixed in the original. The cache argument does not really count, because the pearagraphs will still be longer than 75 characters. Also you already need to know where your translation will appear to do any Drupal translation. that is you will see the translated paragaphs in contex with the non-translated parts. I agree that a half done itnerface looks funny, but its better than nothing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 14:36:42 +0000 : Goba Killes, your reasons are valid, but I still prefer the all-in-one approach. :) I will deal with it either way, so feel free to pick one way. I remember the transition from per-paragraph t()s to all-in-one t()s, and I think it was a good choice (and I have not heard much complaints, although I am not active enough in the translator community nowadays). ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 14:48:43 +0000 : killes@www.drop.org I firmly believed the reason for not getting complaints is that nobody even thought to translate those helptexts and is also a reason for not haveing many 100% translations. There are a number of translations that are listed as being 100%, but that is at least partially due to the script which makes http://drupal.org/translation-status It only counts the non-translated strings that are in the PO files in each directory, not the number of strings in the POT files. The Ukrainian translation for example is listed as being 100%, but there are only 10 out of 33 in the repository. Guess I should fix the script. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 14:53:15 +0000 : Goba Yes, it might be a good idea to msgmerge the po files with the actual pot files in the same CVS branch, and then check for completeness, so that a proper overview is available. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 15:55:37 +0000 : stefan nagtegaal So, now what is the plan? Per paragraph t()-ing or per helptext t()-ing? I'll volunteer for making such a patch.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:02:53 +0000 : killes@www.drop.org I am changing that to cvs. My vote is obviously for splitting things up. PO editors were made to translate small pieces of text and not novels or even essays. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Fri, 01 Jul 2005 17:59:24 +0000 : stefan nagtegaal Then, so be it Killes! I have to agree with you completely. Due to this (and inline with theme_placeholder($text), introduced lately by Steven/Dries), I'll come up with a patch which implements the helptexts, and introduce the following theme_* functions to get things a little easier and more drupalish: <?php function theme_text($text) { return "<p>$text</p>"; } function theme_code($text) { return "<code>$text</code>"; } ?> This makes all the <p>-tags inside the helptexts redundant and helps us to clean up the texts a little more by removing a little more HTML out of it.. The same with the <code> I am still thinking about how we should handle (un)ordered and definition lists, inside the helptexts.. Has someone another plan for this? Please let me know what you think about this idea. I worked a lot on the helptexts before, and tried even mroe times to make them better and easier to translate. Due to that, I think this is the right thing todo.. But, maybe I am wrong.. I'll still volunteer for patching core/HEAD to get this in.. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sun, 03 Jul 2005 10:03:37 +0000 : Dries For now, let's not split each paragraph and let's not introduce new functions. Just fix up the patch as is. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 05 Jul 2005 14:06:41 +0000 : cel4145 Dries wrote, "6. Writing "administer >> menus >> add menu" is dangerous because these paths are dynamic (eg. they can be changed using the menu module). I guess it is uncommon though." I think we have to go with the assumption that if a user is changing menu paths then they should have some awareness that the path itself will no longer be valid, and as long as the paths are links, they'll still be able to access the correct pages. Kieran wrote, "9. . . . We were told to add titles for accessibility reasons. If this is not the case we can remove them." See Dive Into Accessibility Adding titles to links [1]: "Not all links should have titles. If the link text is the name of an article, don't add a title; the link text itself is descriptive enough. But if you read the link text by itself, out of context, and can't figure out what it points to, add a title." So the title must be more descriptive than the original link text in order to increase accessibility. One's that merely restate the original link text serve no purpose. [1] http://diveintoaccessibility.org/day_14_adding_titles_to_links.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tue, 05 Jul 2005 18:18:16 +0000 : Dries Charlie: let's turn that into an official documentation guideline? ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Wed, 06 Jul 2005 03:54:29 +0000 : cel4145 " let's turn that into an official documentation guideline?" Done. Updated documentation authoring guidelines 5a [2]. [2] http://drupal.org/about/authoring ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:32:29 +0000 : Robin Monks Attachment: http://drupal.org/files/issues/drupal.-.admin.-.help.patch (131.1 KB) New patch, hopefuly for 4.7. Comments, raves and rants welcome! Robin ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Thu, 15 Sep 2005 18:56:56 +0000 : m3avrck Never really used the help in Drupal, but going through this, looks really solid! Patch actually applies cleanly too, minus the settings.php included at the end ;) Looks good to me!