[Foundation-l] [Wikitech-l] Implementing the Babel extension

[Andrew Whitworth]

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 10:16 AM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> That is not here and now.  At this moment we are considering the
> implementation of the Babel extension, we are not considering something we
> did not do.
>
> When you think that it is easy to localise templates, think again. There are
> many hard issues that have to be solved in this way. To name a few:
>
>   - Localising templates means fixating them in a specific way
>   - Templates are used in languages and many scripts. The text can be in
>   two directions.
>   - Templates are used for "info boxes", why not have the content localised
>   as well

The idea of having a generalized extension for sharing pre-made and
pre-localized templates across projects is an interesting one.
However, with the exception of these babel templates (and maybe
copyright licensing templates), I can't imagine too many templates
that are going to be useful across both projects and languages. A more
general solution is only desirable if there is a more general class of
problems to solve. The idea that it might be nice to be able to share
more templates then just Babel is a good one, but the reality is that
there are few other templates which could possibly benefit from this.

Gerard makes the good point that it's a lot of work to localize a
template into 100+ languages, and there are few benefits for doing
this to most templates.

--Andrew Whitworth.