On Fri, Mar 28, 2003 at 11:32:21AM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > Followup to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > By author: Tomohiro KUBOTA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > In newsgroup: linux.utf8 > > > a) It needs to be easy to write internationalized and multilingualized > applications. > > b) Programmers need to be taught that it is easy, and how to do it. > > When it comes to (a), it pretty much means that the complexity needs > to be hidden from the application programmer. Terminal applications, > toolkits, and perhaps libraries like readline need to support this, > but applications shouldn't need to be affected beyond a few basic > guidelines, such as don't assume byte == character. Getting UTF-8 > universally deployed will be a huge part of this, because it means > that anything other than 7-bit ASCII will have to take this into > consideration. > > We need easy-to-read webpages and easy-to-use libraries how to do > this, even for monolingual, American programmers who might not be > using characters outside the US-ASCII set on a daily basis. > > > Of course several Japanese companies are competing in Input Method > > area on Windows. These companies are researching for better input > > methods -- larger and better-tuned dictionaries with newly coined > > words and phrases, better grammartical and semantic analyzers, > > and so on so on. I imagine this area is one of areas where Open > > Source people cannot compete with commercial softwares by full-time > > developer teams. > > This seems to call for a plugin architecture. More than anything I > suspect we need *standards*.
I agree with Kubota-san and Peter, Internationalization should be inherent in all programs, and even American programmers should be able to easily write internationalized programs. One idea I have had was that strings in programming languages should automatically be put for translation, unless it is a constant. Is that a scheme that would work? Could we just do some automated tools to mark every string for translation via gettext - or would it need further spec, like getting it thru some standards process? Best regards keld -- Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
