[Zope3-dev] Re: MessageID's automatic translation in TAL

[Philipp von Weitershausen]

Dmitry Vasiliev wrote:
> Recently Stephan and me have a discussion on the IRC about purpose of 
> i18n:translate attribute for tags with dynamic content through 
> tal:content attribute. Stephan pointed out that i18n:translate in this 
> case is just a marker for call translate() later. But later I discovered 
> that TALInterpreter.do_isertText_tal() does the automatic translation 
> for all MessageID's even when the t18n:translate isn't present.
> 
> So now the question: Do we need automatic translation for all MessageID's?

No, we don't need it. In fact, there has been a discussion on this a 
while ago in which Godefroid raised the issue that automatic translation 
of MessageIDs wasn't always happening. Jim, some other people and I 
argued that this kind of automation is bad anyway and instead of 
introducing more translation magic, TAL shouldn't do any automatic 
translation at all.

So, in my opinion, do_insertText_tal() should raise a DeprecationWarning 
if it encounters a MessageID/Message object that doesn't have an 
accompanying i18n:translate declaration.

> Stephan also have pointed that automatic translation doesn't allow 
> somebody to disable translation on purpose for some piece of content.

Right. That's one reason why it's bad.

> I'm personally think that automatic translation would be helpful in some 
> cases.

Helpful in the sense of saving a few characters to type -- yes. In any 
other way it is more magic than sensible automation.

Philipp