Re: [xsl] xslt and i18n

["G. Ken Holman" <gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 2009-02-16 18:12 +0000, Andrew Welch wrote:
> > I'm supporting fourteen languages for the United Nations Layout Key for
> > Invoice, using 14 differently-named top-level stylesheets:
> ...
> > Of course everything is modular and I use the stylesheet importation to
> > override the English base strings with whatever strings are 
> available in the
> > given language
>
> It's the fallback behaviour that I'm looking for.

In my case that would have a Belgian stylesheet fragment import a 
French stylesheet fragment which imports the English stylesheet.  Any 
absent Belgian strings might be caught by French strings, if present, 
or at the least by English strings which are all present.

> For example, given
> the key "page.title" and the locale "fr_BE" (Belgian French) then it
> should return the value for "fr_BE".

You may wish to stick to xml:lang values "fr-BE" and "fr" according to XML:

  http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/REC-xml-20081126/#sec-lang-tag

> If one doesn't exist it should
> return less specific French one (fr_FR... I think)

That would be "French as used in France", as opposed to generic "French".

> and if that doesn't
> exist then a default value (usually the English translation or even
> the key itself)
>
> We almost get that using a specific stylesheet and import precedence,
> but you need either a) a specific stylesheet for every locale

Yes, which is what my users accept ... they just pick which 
stylesheet they want ... seems to make more sense than an extra 
invocation parameter.

> or b)
> the host language to pick the appropriate specific stylesheet for any
> given locale.  I really want to avoid relying on the host language and
> have a pure xslt solution.

So the stylesheets would support all languages?  How would the user 
communicate the desired language?

> > What benefit are you looking for by which improvement could be measured?
>
> Usability improvements.  For example, in Java there are "Resource
> Bundles" - to support a new language you just drop an appropriately
> named properties files into the right place and that's it.
>
> In JavaFX, it's the same but inbuilt into the syntax itself.
>
> In XSLT we should be able to implement localisation support without
> relying on extensions (and keeping the 1 file per locale approach)...
> With the template matching example I posted, it gives us the the
> fallback mechanism, but (assuming the templates are suitably separated
> into files and then included) relies on all the includes being
> explicitly included in the primary stylesheet.

Not necessarily ... I took from your original post the use of an 
external XML file with the strings.  A global variable at the start 
of the stylesheet could build the "language tree" of strings, and 
your function could work with that in advance of the apply-templates.

> This means adding
> support for a new locale requires modification of the primary
> stylesheet as well dropping the locale specific file into the right
> place.... not awful but not great either.

Yes, I agree ... I can't think quickly of a "drop in and use" other 
than an importing stylesheet fragment that has all the language 
definitions and a single import statement.  But that would be 
stylesheet-specific, not generic as you are looking for.  And I can't 
use that for my UNLK work because the one language file is being used 
both for PDF and HTML.

XSLT 2 could read a text list of URI strings pointing to language 
files, but that still requires the list to be edited, not just having 
the file dropped in.

Perhaps if your URI resolver interpreted opening a subdirectory by 
returning an XML or text document listing the directory contents, 
then having dropped a new language file into the directory your 
language tree initialization could make sense of the files present.

. . . . . . . . . . Ken

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