We have specifically settled on plaintext format (and not XML or binary) because we wanted the property lists to be human readable and editable. Using human readable keywords is an important part of that.
The software can internally translate the keys, again this can be done with a key/value lookup from a property list. Multiple languages can also be supported this way. OSX/Darwin does this sort of thing all the time via separate sets of plists, one for each supported language/locale. Also, a common user friendly approach for language selection is to present each language in its own language, ie. Finish could be "FI- Suomi", that's an approach worth considering for a resource intended to be human readable/editable. regards benjk On Mar 5, 2006, at 9:33 PM, Daniel Swarbrick wrote: > bkml wrote: >>>> locale = US-English; >> A friend of mine who is a lawyer is a founding member of something >> called the Royal British Society for Promoting the Use of Plain >> English in Law Text, or similar. >> >> If anybody wants to start the Royal British Society for Promoting the >> Use of Plain English in Computer Software, I'll volunteer as a >> founding member in a heartbeat. > > You're assuming that all developers and users have some knowledge of > English, which, IMHO, is arrogant. To a German, "English" is > "englisch". > To a Russian, it is "angliiskiy" (and in Cyrillic). This is one of the > reasons why we have ISO language/locale codes. They are an > internationally agreed upon way of representing language/locales. Why > deviate from the standard adopted by Windows, MacOS, Gnome, KDE, > etc for > representing regional settings? > >> That way, ordinary people will be able to use a front-end to choose >> their locale without even knowing what a locale is and they can even >> read and understand the database file. > > Leave it up to the GUI or View, in MVC parlance, to represent the > locale > description to the user. In a Russian setup, it's going to stick out > like dogs' bollocks if the whole GUI is in Cyrillic, but the language > selector says "US-English". Likewise an Asian GUI. > > Anybody who runs multiple keyboard setups in pretty much any OS will > know what a locale is. The locale select toolbar usually sits > somewhere > on the taskbar. In fact, pretty much any non-English speaker is forced > to know a bit about locales, since they often run their computer with > their native language plus English. > _______________________________________________ > Openpbx-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.openpbx.org/mailman/listinfo/openpbx-dev ___________________________________________________________ Win a BlackBerry device from O2 with Yahoo!. Enter now. http://www.yahoo.co.uk/blackberry _______________________________________________ Openpbx-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openpbx.org/mailman/listinfo/openpbx-dev
