[WM] multi language support?

[Chris]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 04:04:32PM +1100, Justin Mason wrote:
> 
> Chris said:
> 
> > What has been done:
> > Up to now we played with the possibilities webmake offers us. The current
> > version defines a new content tag '<lang id="..">' which enables us to write
> > multilingual contents. Unfortunatley this is hard to do with EtText as it is
> > very sensible with newlines and so on. Inserting any kind of tags kann mess u
> > p the output, so we sticked to 'text/html' input. 
> 
> BTW is this due to addition of <br /> tags?  That's been bothering me a
> little, as well.  I may change the behaviour of this, so that if a HTML
> tag is present on the short line, it will not add a <br />.

It seems so. I'm not sure at which step the tags are parsed (and therefore the
content replacement) takes place, and when the converstion from EtText to Html
happen. So do don't know what is actually fed to the converter. 

> 
> I had considered a good way to do it might be to do this:
> 
> 	<wmmeta name=title_de value="German">
> 	<wmmeta name=title_en value="english">
> 	<wmmeta name=title_ga value="Gaeilge">
> 	...

Great and simple idea ! 

> so when generating maps/indexes use $[this.title_${lang}] or similar
> instead of just $[this.title].  Ditto for other metadata items.  This way
> it would be possible to maintain a wide set of metadata in different langs
> simultaneously.
> 
> Together with the <lang> tag you've got (for the content text), this
> should work?

I think so. I'll try it.

> For future work -- my idea was to build on this somehow -- possibly by
> using a new character inside the metadata reference format, so instead of
> 
> 	<wmmeta name=title_de value="German">
> 
> one would use a special char-and-lang suffix:
> 
> 	<wmmeta name=title!de value="German">
> 
> and then somehow, $[this.title] would provide the correct language,
> based on some variable setting (probably set by the output file).
> 
> Does this make sense?

Sounds good. What about the concept of "main url"? I didn't quiet understand
what this meant. Am I right that this is the URL I get with
"content_object->get_url()" ? When we have multiple languages then we have
more than one URL for each content. Is this a problem? Does this have any
impact on other things? 

Another idea besides introducing that specieal character "!" might be to have
another attribute for the meta tags (e.g. lang :-). What do you think?

I would like to add this to webmake. Can you give me (again) some hints on
where to start? Where is the inference of the $[this.title] variables done?
Where is the parsing of the <wmmeta > tags done? I know I should be able to
deduce from the librrary filenames and the code. But maybe you can guide me
:-).
i

Regards,
Chris