Semantic marking for i18n

[Chusslove Illich]

Some time ago, there was a discussion(*) about marking arguments to i18n'd 
messages in a way that allows automatic formatting features, for better 
visual consistency. E.g. a file paths could be always displayed bold, and so 
on. The desired convergence would be to formatting-free messages (having no 
rich text tags, and no quotes).

The discussion was a bit of a furball, but either way we need to decide on one 
thing: how will the programmers mark arguments? I present two options:

i18n("Delete %1?", i18nFilename(file)); // by wrappers

i18n("Delete <filename>%1</filename>?", file); // by tags

Wrappers mean support from the compiler for the programmers, and tags mean 
giving extra context to the translators. Tags may also be introduced for 
non-argument related stuff, e.g. "<emphasis>Really</emphasis> delete 
<filename>%1</filename>?".

I'm in favor of tags because they are more general and expandable. They could 
also be a subset of Docbook tags, so that there is nice match for translators 
between messages and docs.

Finally, is semantic marking too big a bite at programmers' habits? Krazy 
scripts could easily hunt visual formatting, i18n implementation could easily 
strip it out with debug warnings. But, it is impossible to batch convert the 
current code (grep through stable branch shows ~8000 messages with 
tags/quotes).

(*) http://lists.kde.org/?t=115191373600001&r=1

-- 
Chusslove Illich (Часлав Илић)
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