On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 13:57 +0100, Martijn van Oosterhout wrote: > The DDTSS isn't great. It was written by me as an alternative for the > mail interface. It wasn't really designed for this sort of usage. As > for whether efforts were lost, it's hard to say. What generally > happens is that a new key is inserted into the database and because > the index is corrupt it can't be found again. When I rebuild the DB I > ignore the index so those lost entries should reappear. OTOH, maybe > it's possible to really lose stuff, I don't know. I think we can all agree that the effort you have put into creating the DDTSS is very much appreciated and that this interface is much more comfortable than the regular e-mail interface. > I think it would be useful to work out what the next step should be. > If that is that DDTP will forever need its own system, then we need to > spec out how that should look. If people think the interface is OK but > the implementation sucks, we can work on that. But I agree something > needs to be done. Considering the implementation of the DDTSS, I think that a few things could be improved. First of all I don't think that web interfaces are the best way to provide access to a system that uses very much different encodings, since standard HTML is not very compatible with it. Of course new standards such as XHTML and HTML 5 support all kinds of encodings, but not every browser supports them (especially legacy CLI browsers) and many browser implications that do suck at it. For example, as Martijn noted in the DDTSS self, many browsers display a non-breaking space as a period. I think that a command line interface with a text editor like emacs would do the trick best, since the translator most probably already uses a locale on his own system that fits the translation best. Plus, emacs already supports many different translation formats, like po, and could easily be extended to provide support for e.g. the WML format used by the Debian website. Secondly, the system should obviously be implemented more stable. The debugging should be done very carefully and there should be enough people who know about it's internals in order to perform regular maintenance. (I suggest C, but then again, I am a script analphabetic) That being said, I would like to add that the DDTSS is by far the most user friendly and intuitive project interface I have seen for all running l10n projects. I feel that many of it's functions should be used by the other projects. It will very much improve usability and therefore ease the very steep learning curve that many of us have experienced and because of which many have decided to abandon l10n completely. This is were my original idea for combining all translation projects into one interface comes in. Since the DDTSS needs reimplementation, or at least very much code hacking, it would not be a very great effort to integrate existing interfaces - such as the status scripts, the po index pages, etc - into a new/updated system. And this is where I end this ridiculous long e-mail. For the ones that live near GMT+1, have a good night. Greetings, Eric Spreen
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