[pmwiki-users] Feature request: Action lists in skins

[Joachim Durchholz]

Bronwyn Boltwood wrote:
> On Apr 6, 2005 6:40 AM, Joachim Durchholz <jo at durchholz.org> wrote:
> 
>> i18n doesn't work well with action names anyway. In fact most of
>> the action entries in skins that I have seen don't use i18n at all,
>> and I had to hand-translate them.
> 
> That would be because beginning skin developers don't understand what
> the $[brackets] do or how they work.  Why would they?  "The template
> is just HTML, right?"  Would $[brackets] magically disappear in
> HTML? No.  So to make sure that their skin looks right, they take
> them out. I did.

Ah, then that's a design buglet in the semantics of $[...].

Proposal: if $[...] doesn't find a translation, it should simply leave
the original text in and drop the $[...] around it.

Example: If the skin contains $[wrzlbrmft], and the XLPage doesn't
contain a translation for "wrzlbrmft", the result should be "wrzlbrmft",
not "$[wrzlbrmft]".

Variation: Maybe $[...] should emit code like
   <span class="untranslated">...</span>
around untranslated text. That would allow the wiki admin to quickly 
identify untranslated text (say, by assigning a red background to 
.untranslated in CSS). On the other hand, it could give a false sense of 
security, since untranslated text can appear outside of $[...] and would 
remain unmarked.

>> In another, "more normal" case, I saw an action list that was a
>> mixture of standard actions (properly enclosed in $[...]) and
>> recipe-specific actions written without the i18n stuff surrounding
>> them. I'm not sure how to prevent such things from happening in the
>> future.
> 
> I've written at least one of those. Most of the "special" stuff was 
> normal actions with shorter words assigned. :)  My logic was that
> when the admin saw the untranslated words, she would check out the
> tmpl file, and note that phrases without $[brackets] didn't have any 
> translations in the standard XLpage files.  Presumably, being more 
> familiar with XLpage files and her non-English language than I am,
> she would fix the problem.

Well, right, but I didn't want to insert shorter translations.

BTW if you want other texts than the standard ones, simply do an
English->English XLPage. I.e. you "translate" from "Printable view" to
the shorter "Print" :-)
Well, more precisely, it would be a translation from English to
"Bronwyn's Best Practice English for PmWiki pages", so this isn't as
silly as it might sound.

Regards,
Jo