[Zope-dev] Making Zope international

[Brian Lloyd]

> I'm interested a lot in this topic too - I think that if we could
> agree on a feasible and sensible approach, then a lot of the
> infrastructure could be shared and reused for any language that anyone
> cared to provide support for... maybe a way of tie-ing mapping
> dictionaries to arbitrary objects, and then some conventions 
> for naming
> the various messages... if we decided on the right implementation then
> automatic content negotiation could be easy to implement, too!
> 
> (I am personally interested in Japanese...)
> 
> A combination of server settings (environment variables, 
> maybe a Control
> Panel widget or Locale object) and the desired 
> HTTP_ACCEPT_CHARSET could
> be used to decide what language to use.  I'm not sure what 
> the cleanest
> way to do this would be... there are a *lot* of english 
> string literals
> everywhere in the code right now, so internationalisation 
> would involve
> at the very least adding one extra level of indirection 
> everywhere those
> string literals are being used... but I think this could be 
> really good
> in the long run.

This is unfortunately a much hairier problem than it first
appears - for one thing, you do not _truly_ have 
internationalization without unicode, and the use of unicode
raises huge architectural issues - just ask Guido :) These
issues go very deep. The string-sig has been working to find
some reasonable answer to the unicode dilemma - hopefully the
end result of their work will provide a reliable basic level
of built-in unicode support that could be used as a starting
point for thinking about internationalization.

It would be a good thing for one or more champions in the Zope
community with an interest in this to start capturing some
things such as:

  o a laundry list of requirements or use cases describing
    the kind of internationalization support we think we
    need (e.g. "it should be possible to read and render a
    file-based DocumentTemplate written in unicode", "it
    should be possible to create and store a unicode DTML
    Method", etc.).

  o a laundry list of known or possible issues related to 
    internationalization.

If some folks can get the ball rolling by starting to capture
these things, maybe can create something like an
internationalization SIG on the new Zope.org that's coming
soon and let the SIG champions maintain and evolve those
artifacts on the site. If nothing else, this would keep 
these concerns from being washed away in the raging rapids
of the mailing lists...

Brian Lloyd        brian@digicool.com
Software Engineer  540.371.6909              
Digital Creations  http://www.digicool.com