L20n gets tangible

While Firefox 4 was the main focus for the last weeks and months, I’ve been also making progress with the next iteration of Mozilla localization technology – L20n.

Here are three things that constitute a milestone for me and should make it much easier to test and play with the features of it.

Toolbox

Toobox guides you through the examples of various localization scenarios and how L20n solves them. It blends incremental learning of features available to both developer and localizer. At the bottom it contains several more complex example that should rarely happen but constitute the latter part of Pike’s “easy things easy, complex things possible” mantra.

XPCShell tests

It’s a small (two at the moment) set of tests that run l20n code. It’s a great start point to play with how the library works and how the format works. You can adjust the compiled code, or the library code and see if it gives the expected result.

Live toolbox

What can be better than a toolbox for a geek? Yes. A live toolbox. A toolbox you can not only read, but one that you can actually touch, change, hack on and see the result live.

It’s a hack itself, so don’t be harsh pls, but it does the job. I even included a set of 7 examples (example1 to example7) that correspond to what you can find in the Toolbox. Feel free to modify the L20n code, see if it compiles properly, play with the compiled code, change the HTML or JS and see the results live!

Also, if you encounter a bug, you can save your code and send it my way so that I can investigate it. The compiler is just an initial approach, and a moving target right now as we still don’t have a finalized JS structure schema, but it works for most simple and medium complexity cases, so I’d say it’s ready for you to play with it!

Next steps

Now, that we have Firefox 4 released (yay!), and mozilla-central is open again, I hope to work on landing the initial set of L20n Gecko bindings which requires some updates to the patches themselves first. With that part, we’ll be able to start investigating migration away from current DTD/properties format into the wonderland of L20n.