Re: PHP+gettext (was Re: My stab at the templates)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Shawn T Amundson wrote:
> > I always thought about using gettext() in PHP - PHP has support for
> > this? (http://www.php.net/manual/en/function.gettext.php) and gettext is
> > the translation system used in the rest of GNOME - thus, GNOME
> > translators can re-use dictionaries, statistics tools, and all other
> > tools when translating the web site, and maintaining the translation
> > will be just like maintaining any other GNOME translation. This has *so*
> > many advantages other any other system - if we can use this, it will
> > rock.
> 
> gettext is a solution based on the necessity of combining short strings
> with code.  Even maintaining it in C really sucks; it just happens to be
> the best you can do in that situation.

I obviously disagree.
Please tell me what sucks. The only problem I know is the context
problem, but that is only a problem with very, very short messages.


> Doing it for entire pages of text and/or html is not even realistically
> maintainable.

How come? If you mark an entire page in a single _() chunk, obviously it
will be a pain to translate and maintain. Not so if you for example use
a different _() for every paragraph. And if you write your pages
properly you wont use pragraphs with 15-20 lines or more anyway.

There's no need to reinvent the wheel.


Christian