Re: Please avoid unnecessary markup in messages

[Jim Evins <evins snaught com>]

Hello,

> From: Sven Neumann <sven gimp org>
> Date: 29 Oct 2002 11:16:35 +0100
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Christian Rose <menthos menthos com> writes:
> 
> >    msgid ""
> >    "<span weight=\"bold\" size=\"larger\">What do you want to do with this "
> >    "file?\n"
> >    "</span>\n"
> >    "It's not possible to view this file type directly in the browser:"
> > 
> > In this type of messages, the markup contains no relevant information to
> > the translator, since all the translatable content is embedded in the
> > markup (in the last example above, the message could just as well have
> > been split into two separate messages, so this still applies).
> 
> This is exactly what the HIG is telling developers to use when
> creating a message dialog. The dialog layout as specified makes use
> of empty lines and the HIG suggests to use a single string with line
> breaks to achieve this. In my opinion the HIG is right in this case.
> With all the other statements you did, I agree.

I normally just lurk here, but I would like to offer up what I have done
in gLabels:  I created a hig module with dialogs and layout widgets that
hide the markup and various layout tricks from the application.  For
example, to create glHigAlert dialog, one would simply use:

    GtkWidget *gl_hig_alert_new  (GtkWindow      *parent,
                                  GtkDialogFlags  flags,
                                  GtkMessageType  type,
                                  GtkButtonsType  buttons,
                                  const gchar    *primary_text,
                                  const gchar    *secondary_text);

which accepts 2 separate strings and it not only applies the appropriate
markup, but also does all of the other layout tasks suggested in the HIG
-- separating content from presentation.  The module also includes other
widgets that simplifies the creation and layout of HIG compliant
dialogs.

Perhaps there should be a gnome_hig library so that application
programmers can more easily create HIG compliant dialogs?

-Jim