(resending to include m.d.b2g; my email client tricked me)
Hey Kazé!
Thanks for starting the conversation! I'm about to post to dev-l10n to
bootstrap a wider taskforce whose goal will be to help define good UX
and developer guidelines and test Gaia against them. More details in
the newsgroup soon.
Quoting Fabien Cazenave (2014-02-04 17:17:58)
> My opinion about that is that’s it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg
> problem: we won’t get proper RTL support without supporting Arabic
> (or Hebrew) officially, and vice-versa.
>
> Suggestion: what about promoting Arabic to an “officially supported
> locale” status, include it in our test builds, and get some help from
> the Arabic-speaking community to report RTL issues and propose fixes?
I think you're right, it is a chicken and an egg problem, but I'd
suggest first fixing two things in parallel:
1. UX guidelines: we can and should start with UX; let's compile
a list of good guidelines so that we know what the desired behavior
is and what is currently broken; the community's help is going to
be crucial here, b/c they're our eyes and ears in the RTL markets
and they understand the needs of the users much better than we do;
2. RTL localizations: I know it's not fun right now to localize into
RTL languages b/c most of Gaia is broken (with a few notable
exceptions, like the Settings app!). But if we can get some
traction with Arabic for example and get those 1200 missing strings
translated, it would help a lot with testing.
Once we have the guidelines, we can start filing bugs; once we have
the bugs, we can know how much work it will take to make Gaia support
RTL fully; once we have the work estimate, we should promote Arabic to
an officially supported locale. Let's make this an informed decision
and demonstrate our full committment by gathering data first. That's
why I started the wiki page you linked to in your email:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/L10n:B2G/RTL
I'm going to get my hands on an iOS device tomorrow and fill in the
details in the Competitive Analysis section.
I also triaged most of the bugs I could find related to rtl, bidi,
right-to-left, Arabic etc and set them as dependencies of
https://bugzil.la/906270.
> Ahmed suggested to organize a localization sprint for Firefox OS
> during the next Arabic Mozilla meet-up. I think it would be a great
> opportunity for a couple Gaia developers and UX engineers to meet the
> Arabic community and land the most important RTL fixes while the
> translation is being done.
These are two great ideas: an l10n sprint as Ahmed suggests would help
us with #2 above; an engineering sprint will move us closer to having
good support for RTL eventually, but I believe we first need to
establish good guidelines with UX, as per #1 above.
I'll start the UX discussion in the newsgroup and reach out to relevant
folks. There's an interesting session related to RTL planned for this
Friday as part of the UX workweek in SF. I'm hoping we can make the
recording public.
-stas
--
@stas
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