Re: [bug-gettext] New GNU Gettext features (was: New Gettext contributor)

[Shaun McCance]

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 20:15 +0100, Miguel Ángel Arruga Vivas wrote:
> OTOH, and in my very humble opinion, I think that generic XML parsing in
> intltool is not the right way. Internationalize an xml file must not
> modify its structure:
> 1- There is an standard attribute 'xml:lang' that could be used to mark
> strings that could be translated, or
> 2- Internationalization could be part of the XML definition, like in
> GSettings or GtkBuilder and Glade, or
> 3- It could be a mix of both, with xml:lang and specific attributes and
> tags. I do not endorse it, but somebody may have good reasons to do it.

xml:lang only identifies the language of an element's content.
You can't reliably use it to determine what's translatable, or
how to segment translatable content.

Luckily, there's a W3C standard to do exactly this:

http://www.w3.org/TR/its/

And version 2.0 is due to be a recommendation later this year:

http://www.w3.org/TR/its20/

And we already have a tool that can translate any XML file with
PO files, getting its information from ITS:

http://itstool.org/

--
Shaun