[Mailman-Developers] Web UI

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Terri Oda writes:

 > Not very.  Not only is it tightly integrated, but any text change  
 > will have to go through all the many translators for various  
 > languages.

Aha.  You beat me to that one.

I think that one way to deal with that, though, would be to simply
refactor the existing interface.  Unless Mailman does something very
weird, as I understand the implementation of gettext a strict
prohibition on changing the strings should allow you to use the same
translations.  Obviously the page would need to be retranslated,
though.

It should be possible to automatically create a database of many
useful translations even if they're not already in a gettext message
catalog by parsing the HTML.

Another possibility (which is not as attractive) is that I believe
that it's possible in gettext to change the template string but leave
it attached to the translation until the translation is updated.  This
obviously does depend on the translations being in a gettext message
catalog, though ... it won't work for page templates.

 > that appeals to a rather large array of people... Changing the web UI  
 > is a big pain.

Well, maybe we don't have to change it, just add a better one to it.
This probably requires some Deep Thinking, as there may be assumptions
that there's only one way to change an option buried in the interface
(in particular, the "changing the option here may cause other screens
to be out of date" kind of thing, but there may be more serious issues).

Sure, this could be done naively and just make things more complex,
but there may be ways to avoid that.