Re: [Evolution] mail i18n issues

[Jamie Zawinski <jwz jwz org>]

Dan Winship wrote:
> > >         In-Reply-To: Your message of DATE <MSGID>
> > >
> > >         On DATE, PERSON wrote:
> >
> > These should be localized strings.
>
> Well, you want them to be in a language that the recipient will be
> able to read. That may not include your primary language.
>
> If we could localize them, but pick the translation to use based on
> the language of the message being replied to, that would be great
> (unless we were replying in a different language of course). But if
> someone who normally hacks in Swahili replies to this message, we
> don't want "On April 19, Dan Winship wrote:" to appear in Swahili at
> the top of the reply.

I dunno, this sounds like a rathole not worth crawling down...

I don't think it's going to upset anybody if, when they reply to
a message, the "...wrote" text is in their default language.
That's also going to be what their keyboard mapping and input
method is in, after all.  I expect that people who regularly 
correspond in multiple languages already have bigger hassles to 
deal with than this...

> Part of the take home lesson from that seemed to be "anything in an
> In-Reply-To that's outside of <>s exists for humans only".

Hmm...  I guess my take-home lesson was just, "In-Reply-To is a mess."

> I find that having the date in an In-Reply-To is useful, for instance,
> when someone replies to a very old message. (Having "On DATE, PERSON
> wrote" before the quoted part of the reply serves the same purpose.)

Leniently parsing messages from old software is one thing, but on no
account should new software put anything in an In-Reply-To field that
contains anything other than <>-enclosed message IDs.

I am happy to report that DRUMS requires this, so we don't have to argue
about it :-)

DRUMS also has complicated rules about what you should do when a message
has both In-Reply-To and References, and what to do if you want to
generate both of them, but in my opinion, that's all just a waste of
time and there's no reason to generate In-Reply-To at all: References is
sufficient.  

-- 
Jamie Zawinski
jwz jwz org             http://www.jwz.org/
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