#Internationalisation is more than conversion of numbers

A friend read my last blogpost and pointed me to a recent presentation about the current best of breed internationalisation for JavaScript. He had been testing the new jQuery internationalisation library published by the Wikimedia Foundation and was astonished that the one thing "everybody" does was missing.

His question was: "where is the conversion of numbers and dates?". Obviously MediaWiki "does" the conversion of numbers and dates, it is just not part of the library that enables what is most crucial for us in Internationalisation; the translation of the messages in more than 280+ languages.

My friend Andrew was thinking of extending the library with the conversion of numbers and dates. It makes sense to have them included however, forking this really new library at this early time is "evilish". Talking to Santhosh, the developer of this library is the thing to do. It is, because in this way any future improvements in the existing 280+ languages or the missing 6000+ languages will be shared by anyone who updates to this library.

YES, I know jQuery is Java and not JavaScript. But I also know that my friends at the Wikimedia Foundation support the localisation of their JavaScript.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#MathJax is looking for #money

#Mathematics is said to be a language of its own. When you look at a formula, all the logic is in the formula and any text only aids in the understanding. Who cares for text..

This must have been what the developers of MathJax had in mind when they wrote their application. It is all about mathematics and all the rest is obvious eh, English.

MathJax CDN is what the people behind MathJax are asking money for. It provides a service that gives you beautifully presented mathematical formulae in your browser. Because MathJax knows YOUR browser, it does the best for the web page that is provided.

To finance the CDN service, they are asking for donations. I do understand English so I can inform you that at the time of publishing this blog post they had $370.00 in pledges.

Sadly both the MathJax software and the MathJax website are not internationalised. As you can read in this mail, the software will need to be adapted to allow for localisations. When the MathJax developers work together with the fine people at translatewiki.net, they will find people who can advise them on how to internationalise. Recently the JavaScript used by MediaWiki has been adapted to use grammatical gender and plural. Possibly the code or the expertise can be used for MathJax as well.

Once MathJax is internationalised it will be localised in many languages .. There are many proud mathematical cultures and traditions outside of the English speaking world. Given that MathJax is already more or less usable in the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, translatewiki.net is the obvious choice for the MathJax localisation.

When everything is said and done, the request for donations will be made in other languages as well. It surely helps when you address people in their own language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Support for #gender and #plural in #JavaScript may mean refactoring code

There are all kinds of valid reasons to revisit code. Improving the design of existing code is definitely one. Often code is changed because additional code needs to be applied. Sometimes, like in the case of implementing JQuery in our JavaScript code, it leads to code that performs better and it has many additional features that are now available to use.

One of the ambitions at translatewiki.net has been the support of GENDER and PLURAL in the messages used in JavaScript code. In order to provide such support, there is a need for functionality that provides the same functionality we have had for so long in PHP.

The JavaScript code to support GENDER and PLURAL has been written. It makes use of JQuery functionality and when the maintainers are lucky, their code already supports it. For the localisers at translatewiki.net, the answer "the software is written in JavaScript" is no longer a valid reason not to expect messages to be changed,
Thanks,
     GerardM

#WCN11 - #MediaWiki gadgets

At the #Wikimedia Conference 2011, one of the best bits of news was in the presentation of Roan and Timo. They have been working on the rejuvenation of our JavaScript support, this brought us a lot of improvements in the past and now they have their sites firmly on the MediaWiki gadgets.

In summary, the syntax to support gadgets is worse then wikisyntax on steroids, the same gadget may exist in a gazillion manifestations on any of the 800 Wikis, internationalisation is a joke, gadgets as they are are awful. Awful because its infrastructure sucks not because of a lack of hard work by a community of people fulfilling a need.

Consequenrly the syntax has to be cleaned up, gadgets are to be shared among the many wikis, it should be able to use all the JavaScript improvements and as gadgets are to be shared, internationalisation is necessary in order for it to work well on all those Wikis.

The best news; Roan and Timo are already testing gadgets with many of the improvements in place. The gadgets are able to use MediaWiki messages and Siebrand and Roan are talking about implementing gender and plural support for JavaScript.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Do you need #JavaScript support for the #MediaWiki 1.17 release ?

Much JavaScript work has gone on in many of the #Wikimedia projects and with the imminent release of the 1.17 release several JavaScript programs are going to fail. The new ResourceLoader introduces alternatives, improvements and modernised functions.

Many JavaScript applications use deprecated functions which may break with the release of 1.17. Although legacy functions will still work for now, check out the list of deprecated functions and their modern replacements.

There are hints and tips, and when you have questions, its talk page is where you can drop your questions. Alternatively there are the IRC channels #mediawiki and #wikimedia-dev where among others Krinkle will be available to help you out.

As time goes on, issues with MediaWiki 1.17 and its performance are solved so the moment where your project will be upgraded is getting nearer. Please help yourself and prepare yourself. Another resource is the log of the office hours with Roan and Trevor that can be found here.

If there is one lesson to learn, then it probably is that standards evolve.
Thanks,
       GerardM