Bug 257592 made about: partly localizable. Issues: 1. The word "Copyright" is hard-coded. 2. The sentences about "SupportSoft, Inc." and "The Regents of the University of California" are hard-coded. These sentences could also link to about:license#exceptions and about:license#ucal. 3. There's a missing space between "Netscape Public License" and "document"; I also consider "document" redundant. 4. The next question is whether we can remove the reference to the NPL since the linked about:license contains a dozen licenses, but not the NPL. Gerv? 5. I still think we don't need to localize the "U.S. GOVERNMENT END USERS" note, since it only affects en-US users. Except if we were allowed to remove that sentence from localized builds, then I'd move it to the dtd and add a localization note to leave it empty in localized builds.

I didn't know about the existence of this page. Really, all licensing information (including those sentences and the NPL reference) needs to be removed, and replaced with a single link to about:licence. Note that not all US Government end users speak English; some may, for example, speak Spanish. Or Navajo. I've never understood the requirement for those notices; what happens if they aren't included? Does the US Government suddenly have a right to do nasty things with the software? Gerv

The "U.S. GOVERNMENT END USERS" notice is part of the EULA, #7, which is linked from about:license. about:license also contains the copyright claims of SupportSoft (regarding Talkback) and the University of California. So it looks like we can remove all the copyright claims except links to about:credits and to about:license, something like this: We would like to thank our [link]contributors[/link], whose efforts make this software what it is. See [link]about:license[/link] for licensing information. Note that the Help->About Mozilla Firefox dialog contains copyright claims as well.

Would it perhaps be better to make going to "about:" bring up that dialog, instead of having two nearly-identical forms of the same information? Gerv

I'm not sure whether we need the about: page. It's mostly a duplication of the about dialog. But the dialog doesn't link to about:license. Maybe we should replace the licensing stuff from the dialog by a link to about:license?

(cc: mconnor, cbeard) The "About ..." menuitem is better suited for "human" consumption, and unless it's absolutely necessary to link to the EULA or license from that page, I'd recommend against it. There's already a surfeit of information there (the UA is gobbledeegook to most users) IMO, and it's in line with what people look for in "About" dialogs, which is to say: copyright claims & version numbering. The about: dialog itself could benefit from the localization changes proposed, and a restyling to look a little less like "My First Webpage" (perhaps lifted from about:plugins) I'm pretty unclear about the use cases for this page, though, as well as the requirements. For instance, if there is no requirement to repeat the copyright claims, and no requirement to include the section for US Government End Users, then I'd suggest that about: simply ... - repeat the information of "About ..." - have a link to the contributors list - have a link to the license - have a link to the EULA The reason why the repetition makes sense is that in the case of the dialog, the user gets the lightweight information, but should we wish to point someone to more detailed information (from a webpage, etc) we can just pop the about: URL in there and we'll know they hit the right place.

Maybe the about: page should be redesigned and made more useful as a power-user resource, while dropping all the (C)-related stuff which is already in Help > About? For example, like Opera's about: page it could provide the user with more detailed information about current profile (e.g. where it is stored) and have links to some of the useful about:* pages, like about:plugins, about:license, about:cache, about:config and about:buildconfig? It would be nice if some these about: pages got a good looking and unified design a la mozilla.com or .org. Currently about: looks just like Netscape 6's about: page from six years ago, only without all those banners. ;-)

This is how it could look like. I used the design of about:neterror. The logo links to mozilla.org and the version string to the release notes like the current page. "Contributors" links to about:credits. The about:license page already contains a link to the EULA page (http://www.mozilla.com/legal/eula/), so I've omitted it here. I've also added a bunch of links to about:config, about:plugins and about:buildconfig, as suggested in comment 6. I'd like to get some early feedback before finishing the patch. I've built with official-branding to show the UI in the final product.

Great start, Steffen. Couple of comments: 1. I'm not sure that we need about:plugins and about:config to be linked to from the about: screen. IMO it will just lead to questions about why screens like about:cache and about:mozilla aren't similarly linked to, and the honest answer is that they aren't meant to really be all that user-discoverable, and are just there for those who know them. Contradicting myself however :) I do agree that about:license and about:buildconfig seem to make sense for this page. 2. Instead of making the version number a link, could we just have a bullet that reads "See the _release notes_ for this version"? 3. Could we put a CSS styled border around the graphic and insert the version number as a string using the same style that we do in the Help > About Firefox dialog? That way the screen would look like: .---------------------------------------------------------------. | | | .----------------------. | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | #################### | | | | Firefox 2.0a3 | | | '----------------------' | | | | o Copyright blah blah | | o Yadda yadda yadda | | | '---------------------------------------------------------------'

Here you are.

(In reply to comment #9) > new screenshot Now, that looks nice! ;-)

Comment on attachment 226242 [details] new screenshot Great. This seems like a simple cleanup fix.

So here's the patch to the screenshot.

beltzner said: > The "About ..." menuitem is better suited for "human" consumption, and unless > it's absolutely necessary to link to the EULA or license from that page, I'd > recommend against it. The MPL and other licences have language about making things like license terms and lists of contributors "prominent" or "easily accessible". People look for this stuff in Help | About; so IMO we do need a link from there to about:license. > The reason why the repetition makes sense is that in the case of the dialog, > the user gets the lightweight information, but should we wish to point someone > to more detailed information (from a webpage, etc) we can just pop the about: > URL in there and we'll know they hit the right place. That doesn't work; you can't link from web content to about: URLs for security reasons. See http://www.gerv.net/temp/about.html for proof. Gerv

I like the new about: design. I would tighten up the text as follows: * Copyright (C)1998-2006 by <a>contributors to the Mozilla Project</a> * <a>Release notes</a> * <a>Licensing information</a> * <a>Build options</a> * Build identifier: <user agent> I assume you've checked that the links work? There are sometimes issues linking about: pages together in chrome. Gerv

This shows Gerv's suggestions. I think the more verbose text is a bit friendlier. And the build id looks out of place here because it's much longer than the other items.

I think the extra text is nice, but like the way that Gerv suggested not using the actual about:whatever labels. Can we get a middle of the road? * Copyright (c) 1998-2006 by _Contributors_[1] to the _Mozilla Project_[2] * Read the _licensing information_ for this product * Read the _release notes_[4] for this version * See the _build configuration_[5] used for this version * Build identifier: %BUILDID% [1]: about:contributors [2]: http://www.mozilla.org/about [3]: about:license [4]: %RELNOTES% [5]: about:buildconfig

Ok, this is better. This shows the changes suggested by comment 16.

OK, I'll buy comment #16. Make sure the patch is fully localisable :-) Gerv

The new suggested content for about: is pretty similar to how I want Help | About to look. Is there a reason why we can't unify the two? Practically, that would mean that typing in the URL "about:", which is the only way to reach the about: page as you can't link to it, would pop the Help | About dialog instead of showing something in the page itself. This would have the advantage that we wouldn't need to keep the two in sync, and we wouldn't be repeating ourselves. But I guess it's not an enormous burden. Gerv

Comment on attachment 226948 [details] [diff] [review] patch according to comment 16 This is ok on trunk. If this bug is bound for the 1.8 branch, we should not add a new DTD file but rather reuse an existing file (late-l10n rules prohibit adding new l10n files).

Fixed on trunk.

This is for the branch, with the new strings added to the existing license.dtd instead of creating a new about.dtd.

Comment on attachment 227435 [details] [diff] [review] branch patch > You entered a username that matched more than one user, so we have instead left the requestee field blank. Argh, how I hate this. Is that new? Is there a bug on file?

(In reply to comment #24) > Argh, how I hate this. Is that new? Is there a bug on file? Bug 315909.

This check in caused Bug 343247.

*** Bug 339655 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Axel, it's our feeling that taking this will reduce headaches for localizers, as it will reduce the number of places we refer to the US Government regulations, etc. Please let us know if you're opposed to taking this late-l10n hit.

Why is there a choice for localizers to use about:license or about:licence?

> Why is there a choice for localizers to use about: > license or about:licence? Because Firefox supports either, and one or the other might be more appropriate for a particular locale. Gerv

(In reply to comment #30) > one or the other might be more appropriate > for a particular locale. Neither "license" nor "licence" are more appropriate for most of the languages other than English. This is just bloat...

There are at least five English locales, four of which would use about:licence, so if you like we could remove the American spelling. On the other hand, the support for the second option is a single line of code, it was checked in some time ago, and is not the subject of this bug in any case. If you like, we can remove the translation comment which tells translators about the option, but that seems like a backwards step to me. Gerv

> Because Firefox supports either, and one or the other might be more appropriate > for a particular locale. Are the about: URLs really to be considered localizable? über:lizenz wouldn't sound too bad to me. ;) Seriously: you mistake for English what's actually IT-Speak (the base language of C++, JavaScript, HTML, etc.) - and that happens to have US spelling however much you - and more importantly big parts of the non-English world - might be opposed to this.

> Are the about: URLs really to be considered localizable? No. The about: URLs are in English. Whether we should support both spellings is not an open question, and entirely irrelevant to this bug - apart from the question of whether we should tell localisers about the existing option. Gerv

So this is just a waste of everyones time, and I decided that pulling an unrecognizable string in l10n is not worth that waste of time. If anybody cares that those URLs are actually pointing to something sane, I'm happy to take QA resources for that.

Checked into branch, with "&about.license.link;" replaced by "about:license" and the entity removed. I didn't change this on trunk yet.

about.xhtml: + <li>&about.copy.beforeLink1; <a href="about:credits"> &about.copy.link1Title;</a> + &about.copy.beforeLink2; <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/about/">&about.copy.link2Title;</a>.</li> The last 'period' of this paragraph is bad for some languages (especially for Japanese). This should also be localizable.

Like this? -&about.copy.link2Title;</a>.</li> +&about.copy.link2Title;</a>&about.copy.period;</li> +<!ENTITY about.copy.period ".">

I'd suggest about.copy.afterLink2, don't name entities after their english content, but rather after their function.

As discussed in comment 37 - 39.

Also, the word "version" is not localizable...

Comment on attachment 230001 [details] [diff] [review] make the period localizable a=drivers Please make sure trunk and branch are in sync on this. Thanks!

Comment on attachment 230001 [details] [diff] [review] make the period localizable (Although, as a side comment, it seems like what this really wants is $1, $2 parameters for the links and their contents, since in some languages they might not even be in that order. But this hack seems like it will help most cases.

(In reply to comment #43) > Although, as a side comment, it seems like what this really wants is $1, $2 > parameters for the links and their contents, since in some languages they might > not even be in that order. Yes. IMHO, in Japanese natural wording is: 'Mozilla Project he no contributors'. And there is an option not to translate the copyright information.

Comment on attachment 230001 [details] [diff] [review] make the period localizable Checked in the "period" patch, trunk and branch.

> Yes. IMHO, in Japanese natural wording is: 'Mozilla Project he no > contributors'. And there is an option not to translate the copyright > information. Hmm, the current scheme doesn't allow to swap the two links. Can you find a wording to work around this limitation?

Per comment 41. Sorry for another oversight. The last remaining hard-coded string besides the link urls is the page title, which is "About:", since it's the address of the page.

As noted in #43, the strings really should not assume grammar. Right now it assumes grammar, as the word order is basically set. For Finnish the hardest sentence is: Copyright &copy; 1998-2006 by contributors to the Mozilla Project. In Finnish that would somewhat comfortably translate to "Tekijänoikeudet &copy; 1998-2006 Mozilla-projektin tekijät." (Which word-for-word is "Copyright &copy; 1998-2006 Mozilla Project's contributors"). The simple change in word order is impossible because the sentence is split in to strings (thus, again, assuming the word order). Should another bug be opened for the remaining l12y issues or will this one be re-opened?

I can't think of a simple way to make those links swappable. $1, $2 doesn't help me a lot since I don't need a formatted string with some blanks filled in, but xhtml code complete with text, link urls and link titles. I could make the link urls localizable, so that localizers could swap them, but that would increase the QA effort, see the about:license/licence discussion above. I'd suggest to remove the link from "Mozilla Project", which currently points to http://www.mozilla.org/about/. It's a bit redundant since the logo already links to http://www.mozilla.org/. So the sentence would only have only link: Copyright © 1998-2006 by <a>contributors</a> to the Mozilla Project. The link points to about:credits (no change here). Comments?

Sounds good to me.

IMO, still using that <a href="&releaseBaseURL;__MOZ_APP_VERSION__.html"> link is quite bad, as it forces any toolkit app that uses the standard about page to name their release notes "<version>.html". This is a problem for example for SeaMonkey, where we have release notes as .../releases/seamonkey<version>/

Comment on attachment 230263 [details] [diff] [review] make 'version' localizable Get review before you request approval, please. Why does this make the ID localized as opposed to the text?

Comment on attachment 230263 [details] [diff] [review] make 'version' localizable Let's just r- that then. Nice catch, beltzner.

> Why does this make the ID localized as opposed to the text? Because I'm an idiot ;-)

I filed bug 346180 to fix the remaining l12y issues because this bug is getting a bit long.

And I did spin off comment #51 into bug 346186

Steffen, kairo: Is there anything left to do here, or did bug 346180 cover it all? Gerv

Oops, sorry, didn't see this was RESOLVED! Doh. Gerv

Yes, it's FIXED actually. We still have bug 349985 open, so the relnotes link doesn't work on this page, and then we have a hardcoded vendor URL in http://lxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/toolkit/content/about.xhtml#63 which is suboptimal, but not sure if there's a bug filed on that.

Axel also filed bug 346315, but that's an optional l12y enhancement.