Am Die, 2003-08-19 um 01.35 schrieb Sven Neumann:

> I have a plan but I felt it's up to you to provide a sample XML mapping
> file and some sample help pages for us to play with.

Let's discuss this XML mapping, I'm still clueless...

> What I care about is how the generated HTML files in different languages
> will be structured since the helpbrowser will have to choose the
> appropriate files based on the users locale and it will probably have to
> know how to fallback to the english version.

I hope it's convenient for you to have different directory trees per
language, how they are christened is your call. :)

> I'm not saying that this approach is suitable for larger
> documents but I know that there are tools available that claim to be.

The problem here is that documentation is 1:1 translateable in contrast
to messages which are quite. The catalog system requires to have one
master language and several slaves; I have a strong dislike for this
because every language should have a right to evolve on its own. No
English master and also no fallback to English. If the content between
the different languages diverges -- hey' so be it. It may as well happen
that there will be a German subsection with some special information
just suitable for Germans. Or that the German version will grow faster
than English; that solely depends on the writers.

> If you look at the generated tips file you will notice that it becomes
> rather hard to handle with the amount of translations in there. That's
> why I said that your current approach doesn't scale well.

Since there is no measure it doesn't make sense to talk about scaling in
this sense. Nothing prevents me to say:

<section id="foo">
  <title lang="de">Bar</title>
  <title lang="no">Baar</title>
  <title lang="no">Bar I said</title>
  &foo-bar-de;
  &foo-bar-no;
  &foo-bar-en;
</section>

And then have three files all just containing the content for this
section in the language.

There simply is no limit, if a file grows too large to handle sensible
we'll split it into several. Heck, I could even use a XSLT to do it
automatically.

-- 
Servus,
       Daniel

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