Hi there.
You may have seen the new-look account creation form on English Wikipedia.[1] For now it is an English-only experiment, but my team is developing it and a new-look userlogin form for all languages. The design moves from horizontal rows to vertical form labels, and as a result all the English form labels drop the trailing colon. For example, the existing form uses 'yourpassword' => 'Password:', but the new form needs 'userlogin-yourpassword' => 'Password',
1. It feels odd to duplicate dozens of messages solely because of the dropped punctuation. The trailing ':' arises from using the message in a horizontal layout where English has the punctuation convention Password: ______ But this is a property of the form layout rather than the text. Has anyone considered separating the colon punctuation from messages? I checked and a few languages don't use the colon in their translations; I couldn't tell if some non-Roman language uses other punctuation like a dot or ->. There is a 'colon-separator' message but it includes a trailing space as well.
2. My first attempt at MessagesQqq documentation for these was only:
'userlogin-yourpassword' => "Same as yourpassword but no trailing colon",
Siebrand didn't like it :) . I can duplicate the existing explanation, but how should I note that it's the same text as another message except for the punctuation change? Several of the existing messages have {{Identical|Username}}, I could use that but it's really {{Identical but for punctuation}}.
3. What's the URL on translatewiki to see the MessagesQqq help in context with its templates expanded?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CreateAccount , log out first.
Thanks so much for your help. Eat more fiber :o)
-- =S Page software engineer on Editor Engagement Experiments team