It is nice to see your article about Towards Mozilla 1.0.
(http://www.mozillazine.org/articles/article1958.html) However, in your
articale, it seems you are not clear about the difference between
internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). All your point in the
I18n / L10n section really only refer to localizatoin and localizability
issue.
What does internationalization (i18n) mean is to enable user to use a new
language in the software. Which mean the user can view the content, create
the content in thier language. And this is different from localization.
Localization mean we translate the user interface into that lagnguage.
So... for example, making the brower display Chinese html is consider
internationalization work, and translate the browser into Chinese menu and
dialogbox is consider localization work. For example, since we have
internationalization work on Traditional Chinese, Chinese user in US can
use our English version to view Chinese home page. And most of the time,
the internationalization work is the ground work for localization. For
example, we need to first internationalized the Gecko engine to display
Thai page before we can start Thai localization.
We have the following thing in mind for internationalization in the near
future:
1. Enable Thai and other indic scripts on Linux (Headed by Sun
Microsystem)
2. Enable Arabic on non-Bidi Window, Linux and Mac (Headed by IBM)
3. Support W3C Ruby Annotation
4. Fix Hebrew problem on Mac (unstaff, lower priority)
5. Enalbe Indic script on Window 2K and Mac.(unstaff, lower priority)
6. Support Text Service Manager version 1.5 to support Unicode base input
on MacOS (unstaff, lower priority)
7. Improve "Insert Characters" in the composer to include All unicode
range, dictionary based Chinese, Korean, and other scripts (unstaff)
8. Improve "Font preference" to include multilingual sample text so user
know what they will see if they change the font setting.
Hope these example will help you understand the difference between
internationalization and localization.
