Re: Manifest internationalization Model

On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 2:18 AM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Tuesday, 12 March 2013 at 09:00, Janusz Majnert wrote:
>
>> Hi,
>> If I understand correctly, in Firefox OS the localised strings are in
>> the main manifest file, while in Widgets P&C and Google's format,
>> separate files are used?
>
> In W3C widgets they are in the same file, but you are correct that in Google's format it is in a separate file.
>> If so, I think Firefox OS model has the
>> advantage that for hosted apps the user gets localised UI (app name,
>> author etc) before actually installing the app. This makes hosting the
>> app a bit easier.
>
> This advantage comes at a cost (for packaged apps). The Google format allows for large scale localisation of applications - it also provides an i18n API for working with localised data that neither W3C widgets nor API FxOS provides. This is not a bad thing, as JS libraries can be used to fill this gap - you just don't get this functionality out of the box, like you do with Google's Apps.
>
> While developing W3C widgets, at least one large organisation raised concerns about not being able to split the localisation tasks across multiple files, as it made it harder for them to distribute the work of localising content to their localisation centres around the world (as everything is in one file).

I definitely think that we should add better support for i18n for
apps. But it needs to be looked at in the greater perspective of i18n
for the web. I'm hesitant to build an app-specific solution for web
content when the problem doesn't seem very different than for
webpages.

/ Jonas

Received on Tuesday, 12 March 2013 09:43:41 UTC