From: Dave Thomas <Dave@...>
Date: 2002-02-07T01:37:52+09:00
Subject: Inter/multi-nationalization


Jah and I have been discussing internationalizing RDoc. It seems to us
that there are two axes to the problem:

1. What language you are using.
2. What charset you are using.

The language impacts things in two ways:

a. I want to allow multiple languages in comment blocks, so that you
   can (for example) document a class in both Japanese and English,
   and then select which language to output for a particular run of
   RDoc.

b. Im thinking of making the fixed text on the output pages change
   according to the language, so that 'In file:' would change to its
   Japanese equivalent if you said the language is Japanese.

The charset seems to be a different issue. Some languages can be
expressed in multiple character sets, and many languages share a
character set. At the very least the character set will be used to set
the charset= HTTP header, but I suspect its more subtle than that.

So, my question: what does RDoc need to be able to do to support
internationalization? And how do we specify the languages/charsets in
a way that makes sense to an end-user?


Cheers

Dave