Hi!
I have just been thrown into a Cocoon project. I am still a newbie to Cocoon.
One major problem of the project seems to be i18n.
This has resulted in XML/XSP pages that describe the html/wml/pdf etc. pages to be produced on a kind of abstract level, but still all the elements which I would normally consider to belong only to the view level are described in the XML pages before XSLT-transformation. E.g. we have tags describing text, drop-down menues, checkboxes and so on on a XML-page which is used to show the contents of the users mailbox. Then we use a XSL stylesheet to transform this XML-page which is describing a HTML page into a HTML page.
I argued that this violates the principal of separation of business logic, data and presentation which is in my opinion the most fundamental design principle for multichannel-applications.
Also this approach causes redundancy. If we want to change a page (e.g the navigation on this page) we have to change the XSL-stylesheet (which is in reality to be supplied be a design company) and the XML/XSP page.
My idea is to have all the i18n issues to be resolved on the XSL-level, e.g. like it is describe in Eric M. Burke: Java and XSLT. Ch 8 with XSL variables and imports.
Stuff like "You have mail" <--> "Sie haben neue Emails" and Drop down boxes are purely view and should not contaminate data and logic. The XML page used for the pages displaying mailbox-content would only contain data:
<emails>
<email>
<header>... </header>
<body> ... </body>
...
My colleagues argue, the have to produce this mixing of data and presentation I have described because the way Cocoon handles i18n using the I18n-Transformer.
Isn't there a simple way to tell Cocoon which (language-specific) XSL-stylesheet to use according to the preference the user has chosen or according to the language preference of the browser?
Or perhaps have a lanugage-indenpendent XSP-page which produces a language-specific XSL-stylesheet on demand? (looks to be more complicated to be me)
Many thanks for any input,
Hans
- RE: i18n where to do it? HansRupp
- RE: i18n where to do it? Hahn Kurt (CHA)
