Creating Applications with Mozilla
by David Boswell, Brian King, Ian Oeschger, Pete Collins, Eric Murphy
Chapter 11. Localization
This chapter describes how to use Mozilla's internationalization (I18N) and localization (L10N) technologies to make applications usable by people around the world. Because the Mozilla community (and the Internet community in general), is global, it is vital to be able to cross language barriers by localizing your application and making it available to a wider audience.
In this chapter, you are given step-by-step instructions on how to change the visible text for your application in the XUL interface and how to handle nonstatic strings that arise from dynamic string handling in other areas of your application code.
While the basic technologies that are used are not new, Mozilla is innovating in areas such as Unicode support and quick access language pack installs. The information in this chapter about the internationalization (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/intl/index.html) and localization (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/l10n/mlp.html) projects will give you a solid foundation for what is possible in your own application.
11.1. Localization Basics
Before learning how to localize your Mozilla application, it's useful to run through some of the high-level goals and features of the Mozilla internationalization and localization projects. First, here are some definitions:
Internationalization (I18N)
The design and development of software to function in a particular locale. The shorthand term, I18N, refers to the 18 letters between the initial “i” and final ...
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