I’ve been looking for Javascript localization resources on Google and came up fairly empty handed. There seems to be little useful information and even less useful code. The only thing I found, that is actually usable, is a library by Guido Wesdorp.

I find this utterly amazing after a decade of Javascript being in wide use, although I probably shouldn’t be. A likely explanation for this is that Javascript is most often used for short scripts inside web pages. If used on a multilingual website, it’s usually fairly easy to have separate javascript files for each language.

I expect this will change with rise of more complicated, involved web applications. However, so far AJAX toolkits that seem to spring up these days like mushrooms after rain, have been busy with obviously more important things like animations.

I could be wrong. In fact, I hope I’m wrong. Is there a javascript i18n library with following characteristics:

• easy to use
• supports translation of javascript code and HTML
• small and relatively fast
• translations are separated from HTML and javascript code
• handles properly nodes with superfluous whitespace and those where it can’t be collapsed
• supports translation of nodes with other HTML tags as ancestors (not only text nodes)

Guido’s library is a good tool that meets many of these needs, but sadly not all of them. Writing my own one seems to be the only solution.