[Mono-list] ECMA compliance

Miguel de Icaza miguel@ximian.com
23 Nov 2001 14:07:59 -0500


> The important thing is encoding - what encoding to use.
> Many widely-used code editors are not "Unicode-enabled", moreover some
> have problems with anything beyond 7-bit charset.
> So maybe it's better to have only English version embedded, and separate
> files with translation.

I think we can take this decision based on whether we should split out
the documentation out or not.   If we can split out the documentation, I
would advocate the use of specialized tools that would assist in the
translation process.

Come to think of it, it would be possible for the documentation tool
*AND* the translation tool to use System.Reflection to extract all the
public members, and display which ones need documentation to be written
(something that right now with source code is really hard to do, as we
have to go manually to each file and verify everything).

A Windows.Forms client could be able to track everything: summary,
remarks, parameter description for each argument and would also help in
that people would not have to write the XML strings ever, they will just
cope with a specialized client that presents the best possible UI to
document something.  

For translation, the tool could use a split display for the original
english text and the translated text.

> I don't have such experience (moreover, I live in Ukraine, but I can't even
> imagine the docs translated to Ukranian, don't ask me why - it's impossible
> to explain in English ;-))) - still, I believe localization is very
> important).

GNOME comes with Ukranian translations ;-) 


Miguel.