RE: [Rails-devel] Re: HELP

[Erik V. <eri...@hc...>]

At the moment, the game and game-state dependency of the help texts 
concerns me a lot more than internationalization.

At one point I thought about creating a HTML file per game step,
each one being a template to be run through a formatter to replace 
variables by real data (such as OR number, player/company turn etc.).
This could (of course) be a file per language.

But there seems to be too much variability between games to make
this an easy approach. 
We would end up with a file per game, game step and language,
and even then we would need some trickery to handle phase-dependent info
(such as that mentioning the option to buy privates in 1830
should only show up in the green phase).

Perhaps my original goal to exactly describe all currently available 
options at every point in time is too optimistic.

Anyway, the only point I was trying to make so far is, 
that the help displayed by the UI must be provided somehow
by the currently active Round subclass.
That 'somehow' now consists of full HTML text, but it might well
become some language-independent Help class, or just an array
of resource bundle keys, that would be turned into language-dependent 
HTML by the GUI (possibly a different language per player).

Just thinking aloud.

Erik.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: rai...@li... 
> [mailto:rai...@li...] On Behalf Of 
> John A. Tamplin
> Sent: 30 November 2005 23:36
> To: rai...@li...
> Subject: Re: [Rails-devel] Re: HELP
> 
> On Wed, 30 Nov 2005, Brett Lentz wrote:
> 
> > While I don't (yet) want to completely 
> internationalize/localize the 
> > code, it is good to be aware of how Java approaches this and make a 
> > future move a bit less cumbersome.
> >
> > Also, regardless of the implementation, my bigger concern is that 
> > maintaining a help system that is intertwined with the code is 
> > excessively cumbersome and ought to be avoided by 
> everything but the 
> > earliest stages of development.
> 
> Using a catalog-based internationalization system gets you 
> that for free.
> As he mentioned, the tricky bit is handling cases where the order of
> dynamically generated items or even their presentation can change.
> 
> I have always found it easier to use the message catalogs from the 
> beginning rather than trying to retrofit them in after the project is 
> almost done.  Once you get the base infrastructure setup, it 
> really isn't
> much more work to use it than just putting strings straight 
> into the code.
> 
> -- 
> John A. Tamplin					ja...@ja...
> 770/436-5387 HOME				4116 Manson Ave
>                  		 		Smyrna, GA  30082-3723
> 
> 
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