Re: Connect Plone to GNOME's translation infrastructure (was:New GNOME Website - Translation)

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2009-06-08 at 17:15 +0200, Carsten Senger wrote:
> Hi Shaun,
> Hi Danilo,
> Hi all,
> 
> I took the liberty to cc Shaun and Danilo as the gnome-doc-utils
> maintainers (I don't know if you're subscribed to this list). If there
> is someone else to be involved that can help feel free to cc.
> 
> We are developing a new w.g.o. (with plone again) and work on a translation
> export-/import mechanism that suites the translation team requirements.
> 
> The rough plot is to provide xml that needs to be pulled, transformed to po
> and put in the repositories. The (faily plone centric description) with an
> link to an example xml file is described here:
> <http://live.gnome.org/action/edit/GnomeWeb/Plone/Translation>

http://dev.plone.org/archetypes/browser/Products.Marshall/trunk/Products/Marshall/tests/input/atxml/Document.xml

So that's an example of the sort of XML file that would have to
be processed?  Just looking at the example file here, without
seeing a full specification, there are a lot of problems with
respect to internationalization.  I'll summarize a few, but I
highly recommend you read the following:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/
http://www.w3.org/TR/itsreq/

First, it looks like you're shoving lots of different types of
content into the field element.  See here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#DevElemNames

This means that vastly different processing is required for the
same element under different circumstances.  This can cause lots
of headaches.

More importantly, from what I can tell, the payload of the page
is XML-escaped inside a field element.  See here:

http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-i18n-bp/#AuthMarkupAsText

This is a pretty serious design flaw, and it can cause loads of
problems for internationalization tools.

Is this format set in stone?  Does it come from upstream?

--
Shaun