[drupal-devel] Help system redesign

[Grugnog]

On 9/25/05, piotrwww at krukowiecki.net <piotrwww at krukowiecki.net> wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 24, 2005 at 11:52:46PM -0500, Larry Garfield wrote:
> > On Saturday 24 September 2005 11:25 pm, Khalid B wrote:
> > > 2. XML
> > > While everyone is using XML today, and it is very much in vogue, do we
> > > really needed? Wouldn't a simple:
> > >
> > > key1:text goes here
> > > key2:other text goes here
> > >
> > > Be just as adequate?
> >
> > Probably.  As long as it's easily hand-editable it should work fine.  I
> > suggested XML because of the plethora of editing tools available and it's
> > good design vis a vis escape-needing characters.  A colon-delimited text file
> > or some such would work too, as long as we handle escaping of real colons in
> > the string.
>
> > The idea is to not use PO files and t() in the first place for the help text,
> > because for larger text strings they're much slower than a simple database
> > hit.
>
> How are they slower?

I think I am with Dries that a language web editing front end is
probably the most important thing right now. Adding a new language
could be a SQL dump and module. The main function of the module could
just be to add it's language to the various language selection menus.

One useful thing could be to get this language web editor working on
Drupal.org, so various people can collaborate to create the
translations. It may be usefull to have some kind on 'notes' feature,
where translators can add notes about a particular change (e.g. I
changed 'ty' to 'uchaf' as this link takes users up a level, rather
than to home).

If any import/export of translations is worked on I would suggest a
XLIFF [1] standards based XML format would be better than:
* a 'roll your own' XML format: as XLIFF translation tools are already
available.
* PO files: as XML has, I think, better facilities for full
description of international character sets.

- Grug

[1] http://developers.sun.com/dev/gadc/technicalpublications/articles/xliff.html
     http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/xliff/documents/cs-xliff-core-1.1-20031031.htm