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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    Translated IDs : yes !!! (if you want, of course).
From:       Eric Bischoff <ebisch () cybercable ! tm ! fr>
Date:       1999-11-22 12:38:16
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Hello,

I am pleased to announce that Stephan, Frederik and me reached an agreement
about should be done with the translation of the HTML file names.

But first let me apologize for having bored you with so much messages on this
subject. We should have switched offline much earlier.

Here is the proposed solution. If no one objects, we will adopt it as a rule :

- What we need is not a link to a specific filename, but the link to a
specified point in the documentation. The anchors mechanism is the most natural
way to do that both in docbook and in html. Anchors are like marks to
specific entry points in the documentation. You may have encountered them in
HTML. "#coffe" and "index.html#chocolate" are examples of HTML anchors.

- This answers the question "how do we know which entry points an application
needs?" : just grep the anchors in the English doc, and you get the list of what
the application calls, much better than IDs.

- But then, how will applications know in which file is stored a specific
anchor ? One way would be to call "index.html#introduction" from the
application. With this first solution, we need to do the mapping in the .po
file, and thus to call i18n() function in the application.

- The other way round is to call just "introduction" anchor from the
application and to have a file named "anchors.index" (or something like that)
in the documentation's directory. This file would list where all the anchors
are (in which file). With this second solution, the problem is only in the hands
of the translator for documentation, and does not bother the translator of
the application's messages as well.

- Normally, we'll adopt the second solution, because it allows documentation
translation and application translation to be desynchronized, which is a big
advantage. Stephan has kindly offered to write the new help invocation function.
Since most of the applications only need to call the top of the main index.html
file, it is not *urgent* for him to do it.

- So it lets us translate the chapter and section IDs if we want to. I would
personnaly advice to continue translating the IDs. Of course, if the encoding
of your language (Russian, Japanese, Chinese or Korean) prevents you from doing
so, choose to keep the English ID - but this also means that the Russians will
get BIG problems with the results of the automated conversion to docbook...
:-(. I hope this is not the case, and I'll try to find a solution if it happens.

That's all. I hope all I said was right. Please correct me if I made some
mistake or if I have forgotten something.

Thanks to Frederik Fouvry for the "anchors" brilliant idea. Thanks to Stephan
Kulow for making the link to his own projects and having proposed to write the
new help invocation function. Thanks to Thomas Diehl for having insisted on
the practical aspect of the question, and on the need for a consistent policy.

Eric
--
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 __________________________________________________
 Eric Bischoff   -   mailto:ebisch@cybercable.tm.fr

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