"Translatable text in CSS"

Hi,

Here is a draft of the FAQ. 
Rephrasing is going to be a necessity; Thanks for helping!



Question: 
"Is it a good idea to put translatable text in Cascading Style sheet (CSS)?"


Background:
CSS was designed to maintain the rendering information of a document and to
separate it from the document content.
 
Answer:
Under the condition that the translatable text has the following
characteristics: 
 - Linguistic independence: It is a full phrase, independent from the
main document content. In particular no concatenation or embedding is used.
 - Meaningfulness
 - Repetitiveness
 
then storing translatable text in a CSS:
 - Improves consistency.
 - Enables reuse.
 - makes maintenance efficient.
 

For translatable text in CSS , the Translation and Localisation process
needs to:
 - Make sure the T&L tools used do support CSS
 - Translate/localise first the CSS (looking for 'content' property
used in ':before' and ':after' pseudo-elements)


Useful links:
 "XML Internationalization and Localization FAQ" at
http://www.opentag.com/xmli18nfaq.htm
 "Requirements for Localizable DTD Design" at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/localizable-dtd 
 "Cascading Style Sheets, level 2 CSS2 Specification" at
http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/
 "An XSLT style sheet and an XML dictionary approach to
internationalization" at
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-xslt/

Received on Tuesday, 20 January 2004 06:18:34 UTC