Epiphanic Networks' Wikka: XMLLingua Project Page

XMLLingua Project Page

NEEDS RECOVERY

Last edited by KogAdmin:
addendum
Mon, 23 Jul 2007 15:30 PDT [diff]

History

While working on InfoExchange and Eliberation I thought a lot about translation tools. I was not, and am still not, well versed with "traditional" means of providing internationalization such as GNU's gettext or other methods. I've looked at gettext, and it seems to be rather hackish and not particularly scalable.

For reasons listed below I decided on XML as my storage format. Once that was decided I went to work on developing a PHP toolset for building and translating language packs. I fiugred that InfoExchange was probably too simple to make use of XMLLingua, but that Eliberation might benefit from the language packs (as well as a rewrite necessary to use such packs) as there was already an Italian usergroup rather excited about the prospects of E-Liberate. I had also been approached after a lecture by a group from a computer lab building community software that was interested - but they never returned my emails.

Why XML?

XML is human readable
It solves any UTF issues
Just about every sane language has a standard way of dealing w/ XML
It's not as hackish as most parser/generators
It's not proprietary
DTD/Schema (XSD) validation ensures correctness
XSLT allows for pretty printing/display
It's flexible
Gettext (heh)
XML tools (in theory) support multi-byte characters

A sample dictionary

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE package SYSTEM "dtd/language.dtd">

<package author="Greg Feigenson" version="1" description="Language package 1">

        <lang tag="en_us">

                <description>English: United States</description>

                <dictionary>

                        <entry key="welcome">Welcome aboard Dave</entry>

                        <entry key="username">Hal9000</entry>

                        <entry key="test">Would you like to hear a song I learned in school?</entry>

                        <entry key="error">I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that</entry>

                        <entry key="success">Action successful</entry>

                </dictionary>

        </lang>

</package>

Project Status

XMLLingua PHP4 Release
XMLLingua PHP5 Planning
XMLLingua Tools C# Beta
XMLLingua Tools Java Planning
XMLLingua utils Planning
XMLLingua <--> Information Exchange utility Planning