21–30 of 68 posts
My project Lokalized attempts to solve many of these complex plural/gender/ordinal/etc. rules with a tiny expression language: https://lokalized.com
That being said your project looks very cool!
https://github.com/Frizlab/XibLoc/blob/e85a5179bdd93e0174731...
Looks alot like mozilla's project fluent, atleast in the basic use case. https://projectfluent.org/ I wonder why it hasn't been adopted more widely.
It seems the last edit of the page was in 2019, so I'm not sure how up to date it is.
One practical thing I appreciated about MessageFormat is how it eliminates a bunch of conditional UI logic. I used to write switch/if blocks for: • 0 rows → “No results” • 1 row → “1 result” • n rows → “{n} results” Which seems trivial in English, but gets messy once you support languages with multiple plural categories. I wasn’t really aware of how nuanced plural rules are until I dug into ICU. The syntax looked int…
One practical thing I appreciated about MessageFormat is how it eliminates a bunch of conditional UI logic. I used to write switch/if blocks for: • 0 rows → “No results” • 1 row → “1 result” • n rows → “{n} results” Which seems trivial in English, but gets messy once you support languages with multiple plural categories. I wasn’t really aware of how nuanced plural rules are until I dug into ICU. The syntax looked int…
(Fluent informed much of the design of MessageFormat 2.)
Looks alot like mozilla's project fluent, atleast in the basic use case. https://projectfluent.org/ I wonder why it hasn't been adopted more widely.
One practical thing I appreciated about MessageFormat is how it eliminates a bunch of conditional UI logic. I used to write switch/if blocks for: • 0 rows → “No results” • 1 row → “1 result” • n rows → “{n} results” Which seems trivial in English, but gets messy once you support languages with multiple plural categories. I wasn’t really aware of how nuanced plural rules are until I dug into ICU. The syntax looked int…
This post shows a lot of the challenges with localisation, that many seemingly simple tools don't have an answer to: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/04/fluent-1-0-a-localization-... (Fluent informed much of the design of MessageFormat 2.)
I18n / l10n is full of things like this, important details that couldn’t be more boring or fiddly to implement.
Looks alot like mozilla's project fluent, atleast in the basic use case. https://projectfluent.org/ I wonder why it hasn't been adopted more widely.
I often wonder this myself, this really should be a standard by now.
One practical thing I appreciated about MessageFormat is how it eliminates a bunch of conditional UI logic. I used to write switch/if blocks for: • 0 rows → “No results” • 1 row → “1 result” • n rows → “{n} results” Which seems trivial in English, but gets messy once you support languages with multiple plural categories. I wasn’t really aware of how nuanced plural rules are until I dug into ICU. The syntax looked int…
I checked the spec and don't get that really. Something should specify the formula for choosing the correct form (ie 1 for 21 in Slavic languages) and the format isnt any better compared to the gettext of 30 years ago
Let's take your example. In English, counting files looks like this:
You have {file_count, plural,
=0 {no files}
one {1 file}
other {# files}
}
Masz 1 plik
Masz 2,3,4 pliki
Masz 5-21 pliko'w
Masz 22-24 pliki
Masz 25-31 pliko'w
Masz {file_count, plural,
one {# plik}
few {# pliki}
other {# pliko'w}
}
The point is that it's supported, it simplifies developer logic, and your translators know how to work with it.
See https://www.unicode.org/cldr/charts/48/supplemental/language...
(Apologies if I got the above translation strings wrong, I don't speak Polish. Just working from the GNU gettext example.)
What I can say that it's a well-maintained format but also kinda hard to learn.