Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Internationalization (Re: Not on a sunday)

Author:Steve Ivy
Posted:2/25/1999; 6:52:35 AM
Topic:Not on a sunday
Msg #:3236 (In response to 3235)
Prev/Next:3235 / 3237

In a way, this goes to an aspect of Frontier web development which ought to be addressed soon, sometime after 6 ships I guess. That aspect is internationalization. I worked for two years for a studio which did a lot of bilingual development, and this issue cropped up often- it's hard to maintain bilingual navigation, content, and functionality when developing fast-changing content on the web.

I think Frontier could really shine in this area! Some thoughts:

  • Take a page from OpenStep: Applications ship with "english.proj", "french.proj", etc. - resources bundled in the app. The app frameworks know how to fetch the appropriate resources based on user prefs.
  • The first thing to do I guess would be to design a language framework. I think there are some folks working on working on this already, but I couldn't get through to the Script Meridian site to check their mailing list list.
  • Once a framework has been developed, the website developer could seperate out appropriate bits and call, hypothetically, langauge.getCurrent()^.resourceTable.resourcename... or something like that.
  • Combined with "Scalable Content", this could really go a long way to helping those among us who are developing multi-lingual sites, and would add another level of customization to our code- someone could add language resources for some peice of functionality beyond what the developer had time/resources to do.

    I'm no CS major, and make no claims to being able to develop such a beast, but I have worked in a multi-lingual environment, am familiar with some of the issues, and would help out if I could.

    --Steve



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