Jameson "Chema" Quinn wrote: > Hi, this is Jameson. I'm pretty much available afternoons in Guatemala > (GMT-6). > > I pretty much agree with what Andrew said about i18n of the > programming language itself, but I have a slightly different point of > view. I'm interested in doing something that would be as useful as > possible for internationalization of programming itself, in both > education and real-life, *across* languages and platforms. I actually > agree that OLPC and Python is the coolest platform there is, and the > right place to start this effort - but I hope that whatever we do will > be generalizable beyond that niche. > > I want to get the UI right - just enough magic to do everything you > want, but not so much that it gets annoying. That means either being > very intimate with the editor's internal data structures, or being > very bossy from outside them. Either way, but especially in the latter > case, I see that when you mix dynamic changes of UI language > (retranslation or detranslation on the fly), dynamic changes in the > translation dictionary (at the module level, of course), and undo, > things start to get complicated. I talked to some of the AbiWord > developers on IRC about their data structures, and they are > less-than-effusive about how robust their main text data structure is > (their file structure is XML, but their data structure does not have > "end tag" elements for many tags, so they have not been able to unit > test that all their code respects clean heierarchical structure). > > This makes me continue to wonder if AbiWord is the right answer for > the editor widget for the Develop activity. Andrew has been very clear > with me that that is a done decision, because it will preserve a > common UI and allow the new collaboration functions to be used in > Develop. Still, if it were up to me, I'd like to consider both sides > of that question. To do this right, we may want something more > made-to-order - and maybe the collaboration is easier to add than it > would be to hack AbiWord into the right shape. <snip> It may interest you to know that the AbiWord folks are still concentrating on the AbiWord as a rich-text widget idea - I think Marc is doing work on it still (he committed a partially-working Develop plugin some time ago and has been working on AbiWord + Collab stuff for OLPC since), and we also have a Summer of Code student working on the libabiword issues. As our Collab wheel has already been re-invented/refactored, I'd suggest that continued wheel reinvention might be a misuse of limited resources.
Ryan (I'm not sure what you mean about issues with our XML - we output through a standard XML library (libxml2 or expat) and so everything should be well formed. Lack of unit tests are simply due to lack of people interested in programming them [high opportunity cost], not from any technical impossibility, as far as I know. Our DTD is out of date, but again, that's an opportunity cost issue.) -- Ryan Pavlik AbiWord Win32 Platform Maintainer, Art Lead: www.abisource.com AbiWord Community Outreach Project: www.cleardefinition.com/oss/abi/blog/ "Optimism is the father that leads to achievement." -- Helen Keller "The folder structure in a modern Linux distribution such as Ubuntu was largely inspired by the original UNIX foundations that were created by men with large beards and sensible jumpers." -- Jono Bacon, The Ubuntu Guide _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
