[binarycloud-dev] language variant source files

[alex b. <en...@tu...>]

hi all,

more thinking about how to deal with multiple languages in the source
tree... I'd like to see what people think of some of these ideas:

    -if you have a single 'master' source file, which has language keys in
it (like:
        $foo="<lang>file.id</lang>";
    those are just made into standard files within make:
        binarycloud/
                make/
                        binarycloud/
                                user/en/foo.php
                                user/fr/foo.php
from the same original source file: user/foo.php

    -if you need to actually have variant _logic_ for different languages (a
rarer case, but nonetheless important) - we have decided on a naming scheme
like this:
        FileName.php
        FileName.fr.php (for a french variant of the source file, which will
replace FileName.php in the fr/ tree in the make directory)

    -for resources (gifs,js,and css that browser include), we have decided
on a fairly simple solution to the problem of multiple asset bases
(different CSS for Japanese than English sites, different gifs, etc:
        all "browser referenceable" assets, including CSS, javascript, and
gifs must be placed in user/htdocs/resources/

   when you write templates in the source tree, you'll use <img
src="/resources/images/foo/foo.gif">. That will be taken by the makefile,
and ripped into each language specific source tree as:

    <img src="/resources/en/images/foo/foo.gif">
    or
    <img src="/resources/fr/images/foo/foo.gif">
    etc.

the idea here is to avoid this:

<img src="/resources/<?=BC_LANG?>/images/foo/foo.gif">

because that's messy and inconvenient. the only ramification is that you
have to be willing to store your stuff under user/htdocs/resources (or you
have to change the makefiles and run variants)

the contents under resources would function much the same way as the rest of
the stuff in the source tree:

   resources/images/foo.gif would just be copied by the makefile into each
resources/LANG/images/foo.gif

    but if there was:
        resources/images/foo.gif
        and
        resources/images/foo.fr.gif

    then we would copy foo.gif to all the languages except fr, and when we
come across fr, the foo.fr.gif _replaces_ foo.gif.

---------------

I expect most of the source variants actually to be images, because our
language (string) keying system will be quite flexible, and you should
rarely need to write code that is actually language specific at the logical
level.

_alex