Re: proposal for MIME behavior in GNOME

[Danilo Segan <danilo gnome org>]

Hi all,
It's me again, with all those translation-related woes :)

John McCutchan <ttb tentacle dhs org> writes:
>
> With emacs it is an editor so of course you would say "Edit". So if
> a program offers an editing feature the verb would be edit. With
> mozilla it has a composer component that allows editing. I guess a
> better menu would be:
>
> View with Epiphany
[snip]
> Edit with Emacs
[snip]

This would have to be handled with complete strings, and applications
would have to provide these strings for translation themselves.

It's impossible to use "Edit with %s" or "Open with %s" or "View with
%s", because that wouldn't work in many languages.

So, the simplest (from developers POV, or at least it seems so to me)
and best (from translators' POV) solution to this is to provide
every action with a customizable "action string".

So, while definining a new action for text/html, I would set
something like:
 Type: HTML document
 Command line: emacs %1
 Action label: Edit with Emacs/PSGML

Of course, "Action label" would be completely translatable, and
programs themselves would provide it once they register themselves,
but users would be able to provide any kind of label they wish if
they choose to go down that road.

In any case, I don't see how this is different from what would
otherwise be done, because a "readable" name like "Emacs" would have
to be provided with any other solution. Now, instead of putting that
inside "Open with %s", we would have a complete string which would be
used instead of "Open with %s" (i.e. it would become simple "%s").

Cheers,
Danilo