Re: string removal in yelp

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 17:02 -0500, Adam Weinberger wrote:
> Shaun McCance wrote:
> > This horrible string is gone from line 228 of yelp-xslt-pager.c:
> > 
> > "The document ‘%s’could not be processed. The file "
> > "‘%s’ is either missing or is not a valid XSLT "
> > "stylesheet."
> > 
> > Instead, it says
> > 
> > "The document ‘%s’ could not be processed. The file "
> > "‘%s’ is either missing, or it is not a valid XSLT "
> > "stylesheet."
> > 
> > But that string already exists on line 215, so this is effectively
> > just a string removal.
> 
> Unless I'm missing something, all this change does is take a 
> grammatically correct sentence and insert a superfluous comma.
> 
> In the original string, it was clear that the second %s might not be a 
> valid XSLT stylesheet. In the new string, it's not clear which file 
> could be an invalid stylesheet.

The original string, though grammatically correct, was very awkward to
read.  The revised string isn't a whole lot better, but the sentence is
broken up somewhat, minimizing the "string of words I have to try to
assemble" problem.  I don't think anybody would that that the antecedant
is the document, rather than the stylesheet file.

More importantly, do note the lack of a space before the word "could" in
the first sentence.  That's clearly just wrong.

I'll grant that the revised string isn't the pinnacle of clarity either.
I'm open to suggestions from others.

--
Shaun