[OpenLayers-Dev] status of translation possibilities

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 12:23:27PM -0500, Erik Uzureau wrote:
> or maybe to keep the namespaces straight and clean, more like this:


> 
> OpenLayers.Strings.languages['english'] = {
>    'foo': "Foo for president",
>    'bar': "Bar for gardner"
> };

This seems fine to me.

> OpenLayers.String.setLanguage = function(lang) {
>    OpenLayers.Strings.language = lang;
> }

setLanguage, if we're going to provide a method for it, is going to need
to be more complex than that. We'd have to loop through the controls,
and call redraw() on them, to update their text, and I'm not sure that
all controls would support a redraw correctly.

> OpenLayers.String.get = function(strKey) {
>    return OpenLayers.Strings.languages[OpenLayers.String._language][strKey];
> }

It needs to be more complex than this to support interpolation, and I
think it will need to: as the RFC says:

"The OpenLayers.String object will have an additional function,
translate. Translate will accept a translation key -- a single string
which can be used to look up the string -- and any number of additional
arguments. If additional arguments are passed, they will be interpolated
in the string in order."

MapBuilder already has some code that does this, so we can work with
them to integrate those bits of it into OpenLayers.  

It seems there is a general agreement that we need to do this. There are
more technical details to work out:

 * What is the expectation we provide for updating existing langauge
   strings in the code? For example, controls will probably soon have
   the ability to display titles in a control.panel object. However, the
   title property is set on the div when it's created. Do we need to
   make a redraw() that works for all controls that would use text? Does
   this block integration of i18n support into core? (See also: CSS
   support for display, which we didn't block on.) 
 * Do we block putting the library into core until we have all the
   strings pulled out? (I think that given how little text we have, I
   think this is 'yes'.)
 * Do we block all future commits that include text on getting it using
   the translation system? I think the answer to this is also yes.

How far do we go before we put code in trunk?

I think that some people who know more about i18n than me should start
pondering all the things that an english speaker like me is going to
screw up :) MapBuilder's experience here is, again, instructive. 

Regards,
-- 
Christopher Schmidt
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