Comment by 1116574
8 days ago
Looks alot like mozilla's project fluent, atleast in the basic use case.
I wonder why it hasn't been adopted more widely.
8 days ago
Looks alot like mozilla's project fluent, atleast in the basic use case.
I wonder why it hasn't been adopted more widely.
Yes, Fluent informed much of the design of MessageFormat. See this FOSDEM talk: https://archive.fosdem.org/2023/schedule/event/mozilla_intme...
Here's a comparison between the two on Fluent's wiki: https://github.com/projectfluent/fluent/wiki/Fluent-and-ICU-...
It seems the last edit of the page was in 2019, so I'm not sure how up to date it is.
Yeah it's actually MessageFormat 2 [1] that's very informed by Fluent's design I believe; I think that comparison is to "normal" MessageFormat.
[1] https://messageformat.unicode.org/
Correct. MF2.0 addresses all the challenges we identified during design of Fluent.
They seems to be a strong overlap of people behind both projects, so that likely explains the similarities.
I often wonder this myself, this really should be a standard by now.
I can't speak for the status quo, but for at least the first ~5 years (so until 3 years ago when I last attempted to use it), the JS implementation of Fluent was a mess. Constant issues with incomplete API, wrong TS typings (which at that point were external) and build/bundling issues to the point where we opted for a homebrew solution.
I imagine that I probably wasn't the only one driven away by that (and I gave it many attempts!).
We are targeting MF2.0 for inclusion in JavaEcript stdlib (ECMA-402). And later maybe with its own format into DOM for DOM L10n.
The standard is, for better or worse, gettext; it's good enough that any attempt to replace it runs into the problem that people can't agree on how much better an alternative needs to be to be worth migrating to; so you get a constant churn that so far hasn't seen any clear winner.
Feels like it's That XKCD page; there were standards like gettext, then web development came along and a load of people (...present company included) rediscovered localization and pluralization through trial, error, half-building one's own localization library, then the JS world reinvented it, etc etc etc.
Wow, the in-browser preview is excellent. I first assumed it was just a demonstration and appreciated it very much, but then I realized it was live-editable and was blown away.