RFC: More stock translations

[Adam Weinberger <adamw magnesium net>]

In a private mail to me, Alan Horkan made what I think to be a very good 
suggestion: the notions of a unified HIG ideal and a homogeneous desktop 
interface could be perpetuated by ensuring that the same monikers are 
used for the same intentions across all applications.

Currently, we achieve this with such things as Gtk and libgnomeui, 
wherein developers say "I want an OK/Cancel button set," and Gtk takes 
care of the rest. An app won't randomly have "Okay" or "Oki-dokey," 
because Gtk ensures homogeneity.

What if we made more stock translations? What if we decided that a 
"Bookmark" will hereafter be known as a "Favourite" or whatever, and 
left it up to a separate library to maintain these translations? Every 
app has its own strings for opening/saving files, and separate error 
messages for failures. The concept of errno provides a backend API for 
letting libc inform an app when things have gone wrong; why don't we 
provide a unified gnomemessages.so for similar things?

I'm not sure how such a thing would fit in from an architectural 
standpoint, but it doesn't sound implausible to me. What do people think 
of this notion?

# Adam


--
Adam Weinberger
adamw magnesium net || adamw FreeBSD org
adamw vectors cx    ||   adamw gnome org
http://www.vectors.cx