[Seaside] Re: no HTML entities for 8bit characters in UTF-8 encoding

[Colin Putney]

On Jun 25, 2004, at 3:00 PM, Avi Bryant wrote:

>> Regarding i18l text I'm thinking about relation with enumerated 
>> variable embedded somewhere in middle. Example in english (I hope 
>> it's correct):
>>
>>    You have got 1 knife.
>>    You have got 2 knives.
>>
>> In czech it has 3 possible forms:
>>
>>    Mate 1 nuz.
>>    Mate 2(3,4) noze.
>>    Mate 5 nozu.
>>
>> But together with date/time, currency formatting it is rather topic 
>> on data presentation in general.
>
> Some of these same issues were discussed on squeak-dev with regard to 
> the Babel tools.  I'm not sure I like their solution, but it might be 
> worth going back over the discussion.

A while back I read a fascinating article on localization, but I 
haven't been able to dig it up again. The one thing that stuck with me 
though is the idea that localized strings should be functions, not 
table lookups.

So I suspect the right way to go about it would be to use no string 
literals at all in the source code, but have method calls like:

Localization youHaveKnives: 2.

Strings that don't need to be parameterized can be unary selectors. 
This lets all the different languages deal with their own 
idiosyncracies correctly, while still giving a clean interface to the 
programmer.

Colin