/devel

This week I had an interesting discussion with Ratnadeep Bhattacharjee about my previous try to solve javascript i18n needs and it quickly become obvious that my library is not sufficient and likely also wrong approach to the problem.

There are at least two unresolved issues with my current javascript i18n library:

• It doesn’t detect browser language settings and act accordingly.
• It’s one way only. After you changed the language used, you can’t change it again easily.

I’m sure these are not the only two problems, since I have a vague uneasiness about a few more things. Therefore I’d love to hear more thoughts about what you’d expect and need from such a library, before I continue down the possibly wrong path.

The worst thing about PyCon are all those posts from people who got to go.

Envy is a bitch.

Nice idea, but very poor execution.

Update: It seems access to Google Page Creator is limited, so it would make sense if I spend some time explaining what I meant. What Google Page Creator (GPC) allows you to do, is to build a simple website using your browser. It differentiates itself from majority of such tools (but not all of them) in that it allows you to do this through a WYSIWYG interface, where you can easily see exactly how your page will look like when you’re finished with it.

There are things I like. Page creator is easy to use and you get a direct feedback on everything you do. Sadly, the overall impression is less positive, since there’s plenty I dislike:

• GPC is incredibly slow. True, G4 Powerbook is not a top of the line anymore, but there are tons of web applications with similar capabilities (some of them mine) which don’t drag their feet so much.
• As others have noted, HTML produced is simply crap. Font tags should be extinct by now and there’s really no excuse to produce them in 2006. You can get a glimpse of the horror by looking at the source of my page (linked at the end of this post).
• There are plenty of designs, but they mostly differ in color schemes used. It’s hard to find one that isn’t simply dull.
• GPC is simplified almost to the point of uselessness. You can stitch static pages together and build a simple static website, but there’s not much else you can do. I expected more. Something, anything that would make you believe the final result was done in the age of blogs, wikis and mash-ups and not 5-6 years ago.

In short, it’s hardly an improvement over what was already available out there. You can see result of my experiment and I posted few screenshots on Marela.

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