Re: Please avoid unnecessary markup in messages

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

tis 2002-10-29 klockan 20.06 skrev Sven Neumann:
> > Sure PangoMarkup can be used. But I don't see what's wrong with
> > something like this:
> > 
> > str = g_strdup_printf ("<span weight="bold" size="larger">%s</span>\n\n%s",
> >                       _("Primary Text"),
> >                       _("More descriptive secondary text"));
> > 
> > With something like this there is no conflict between translatability
> > and the HIG. Personally I also think it's more readable.
> 
> If you prefer to have the lines ripped apart so that translators have
> to guess that they belong together, that's fine with me.

There's no need to explicitly know that the messages belong together if
they are reasonably well written and self-explaining, like specified in
the HIG in other places. The HIG also specifies that the primary text
should offer basic information and a suggestion, which would be at least
a complete sentence or probably even a small paragraph.

Of course this will be a problem if someone decides that the primary
text should be "There was an error" and lets the secondary text be "with
the foo command", but then they aren't just causing problems for
translators, they are also violating the HIG.

Really, I think this is just a straw man. I've already thought about
this on each and every occurence of a message with a title or a primary
text that got lumped together and caused problems when I had to
translate them, and wondered if it would have been better if they were
split and how that would work. In not a single case the answer was "no,
they relate to eachother in a way that makes them not separable".


Christian