Re: [widget] proposal to add defaultlocale attribute to widget element (P&C Spec), I18N ACTION-18

On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Phillips, Addison <addison@lab126.com> wrote:
> Dear Marcos,
>
> [this is a reply on behalf of the Internationalization Core WG]
>
> We agree that not providing a default locale for a Widget is an oversight in the Widget's localization model. The ability to provide multiple languages in the configuration file or in the locales directory structure does not provide the Widget container with a clear choice when the runtime language is not one of the languages provided.
>
> Part of this oversight may be due to an expectation that there would be a "default" set of resources present in the Widget. For example, if you had a structure like this:
>
>   Foo.html
>       /locales
>          /de-DE
>              Foo.html
>
> ... then if the top "Foo.html" is the start file, it is the default and "/locales/de-DE/Foo.html" represents a German appropriate resource corresponding to that same file. The language of the top-level resource can be anything and can be defined using the usual attributes. However, there is no requirement that such content be provided nor that it be in any particular language.
>
> This does not, as you point out, work with items defined in the config.xml file itself.
>
> In practice, most resource systems require that the "base" or "root" locale's resources be present to guarantee full functionality. The description in Widget's P&C implies this. It should state it explicitly and/or provide a mechanism for specifying the default.
>
> The attribute 'defaultlocale' that you propose makes sense as a means of doing this. The alternative is to overload xml:lang="", but this has a number of negative things associated with it--such as the fact that it prevents the format from indicating what language the default is.
>
> Finally, on a separate topic, we want to note that there is significant progress on internationalization additions to ECMAScript going on currently, which will be of great benefit to widget writers interested in internationalization and which may be of interest to Webapps WG as a result.
>

This is now in the spec, and implemented by Opera. It should ship in
our upcoming release of Opera Desktop 11.10 in the near future.



-- 
Marcos Caceres
Opera Software ASA, http://www.opera.com/
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Tuesday, 8 March 2011 14:00:06 UTC