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