don't linkify one word in a sentence, like "Subscribe to _Newsgroups_" There is no guarantee that when you translate "Subscribe to Newsgroups", that "Newsgroups" will be the last word in the sentence for all languanges. You should make the sentence one entity (instead of breaking it up), and linkify the whole sentence.

Seth, Bhuvan, see Jennifer's comments in bug 67743. She says we should linkify the "action", IE subscribe. When I did my DTD foo, I was basically following what Bhuvan had done with his entities, and a little bit I borrowed from OE 5.5. I'm open to suggestions...

Linkifying in general is not a good idea for localizability as it may impact the translatability. However, certain placement of sentential elements could be understood across many languages. We need to see how this item is actually spelled out. Do you have an image somewhere?

Why not just linkify the whole line? Linkifying just part of it looks clumsy, for something you get to see a a lot, and it makes the link unnecessarily difficult to hit. Linkifying the whole string would remove the i18n problem, too.

mpt, see my original comment.

If the whole line of each line, and hence all the items on the page, is a link, it makes it difficult for users to quickly scan the options and choose an item (the whole page is mostly blue and underlined). If the whole line is a link, they have to read the whole line and hence, each line/the whole page. If key action words are the links, it makes it easier to scan the options and quickly identify the item you want. Using the action words, or the words that are most similar to the feature (such as "filters") with which the item is connected, helps users quickly identify the options.

If you want to emphasize key action words, use bold. Don't abuse links for that purpose. It's bad hypertext grammar. As regards having to read the whole line, the user should have to do that anyway -- if they just read the `Newsgroups' in `Subscribe to Newsgroups', for example, they'll probably think that that link lets them read newsgroups (rather than that it lets them subscribe to newsgroups).

I see that the Japanese version of OE5.x has the whole line linkified on the account UI page. I don't know if the English version of OE 5.x linkifies one word on the line or not. It would be odd to linkify just one word out of 3 in Japanese such as: _Composition_ of messages where only Composition is underlined. It seems possible to create relatively short lines for these items. For example, Read Messages Compose Mail Set up newsgroups searching people etc. I don't think linkifying the whole sentence would lead to reading complexity. We should not be having lengthy sentences for the Account Central UI page anyway -- see what OE5.x does. In any case we shouldn't limit the linkifying possibiliity to just one word. This will severely limit options in some languages and may lead to untranslatability. Question: From the coding point of view, does linkifying one specific word lead to linkifying that 'same' word in another language? Can linkified word or range of words be different from one language to another? If not, this should be avoided. Seth's original point stands in this case. Question 2: Is the linkifying under discussion achieved by assigning 1 entity per each word for that line and then associating the link to one of the entity? If so, that is not be good at all for localizability. (Please note that in this case, apart from the question of linkifying, we will be commiting the cardinal sin of breaking up a sentence into individual units in terms of entities, just so that a link may be assigned to one unit. This is a no-no in L10n.) Seth, where is the translatable resource file located for the Mail UI account central?

Jennifer, what do you think about linking the whole sentence? Are we particular about linking just the action. Linkifying the whole line is not difficult at all and looks like it solves lot of i18n issues. Momoi, msgAccountCentral.dtd url is : http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/resources/locale/en-US/msgAccountCentral.dtd

If we decide that we want to have the whole line linked (which I personally think is too much "noise" persay), please re-assign to me and I will work on it this weekend.

As it stands, "msgAccountCentral.dtd" is not properly localizable due to the fact one sentence is broken up into 2 or more separate entities. This is the side effect of the current likifying strategy. As Seth originally started, the file needs to be changed regardless of the linkifying decision.

Added l12y keyword.

As Stephen mentioned, I think linking the whole sentence will be noisy, but I'm ok with it if we need to do that for international reasons. I will also attach a screenshot of OE for windows. The whole line is black text, links are underlined black and become blue when hovered over.

I will post a new patch sometime later this evening.

At the risk of sounding like a fool, could you possibly mark up how that japanese would translate [preferably at the lowest level]? thanks

timeless, what are you referring to? Are you referring to the entities definitions in the DTD file?

ok, so i sounded like a fool :-(, no i meant attachment 24805 [details]: 02/08/01 14:48 Japanese OE 5.x for Windows -- compare with the English version

All this patch does is combines the suffixes with the prefixes, and sticks them all into their respective links. All the calls in JavaScript to these <!ENTITIY> tags will have to be reworked in http://lxr.mozilla.org/seamonkey/source/mailnews/base/resources/content/msgAccountCentral.xul

!<!ENTITY readMsgsLink.label "Read my mail"> I think s/my //g because My is generally silly.

So, just "Read mail"? What about "Search my messages"?

Read mail Search mail

The 1st patch http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/showattachment.cgi?attach_id=24840 removes the suffixes and prefixes, and lets the whole <!ENTITY> be a nameLink.label. The 2nd patch, which I'm going to attach, is for the XUL file. I had to remove the same references to the suffixes and prefixes I deleted in patch #1. And lastly, I'm attaching a screenshot of an actual build where this all just works ;-)

cool. stephen please attach one giant patch. cd mozilla/mailnews cvs -q diff -u > diff.txt then we can get the review / super review process started...

stephend, can you explain what you meant by: "All the calls in JavaScript to these <!ENTITIY> tags will have to be reworked in..."

Seth, it's okay, my statement was in error. I thought I would have to re-write the XUL file a bit, but it turns out, all I had to do was remove the very same label calls from the XUL file that I removed in the DTD file.

One thing to remember, this page won't stay this bland. We are adding a watermarked background, and hopefully some context sensitive help text. I can just imagine that when it all comes together, this single linking won't remain an issue, and if it helps the process for localization, so much the better.

Re-assigning to myself. Cc:ing David for his sr/r, when the time comes.

stephend, is anyone using the spacer.label entity? if not, can you remove it?

Patch forthecoming, please review when posted.

stephen, get rid of the News stuff also. You can add them when we get to News implementation in accountcentral.

Okay, the spacer.label entity is gone, as are the news entities. I'm really starting to like the way this looks actually.

\ No newline at end of file please put a new line at the end of the dtd file. personally, i'd prefer Read mail, Copose mail, Search mail. but whatever. the newline is !important.

r=timeless still awaiting comment about wording.

I'd change "Read my mail messages" to "Read messages"; "Search my messages" to "Search messages". I thought about changing "View settings for this account" to "View account settings", but I think I still prefer the former since it provides more context.

I checked with Robin, our tech writer. She recommends: Read messages Compose a new message View settings for this account Create a new account Search messages Create message filters

timeless, Read Mail, Compose Mail and Search Mail are very abstract and they mostly sound like text associatde with buttons. One of the intended purposes of AccoutnCentral pages is to increase the usability. So personalizing sentences and making them reasonably long enough but no longer..like 'Read my messages' (or similar) might help us achieving that. Also, I think, limiting the number of words might limit us in explaining some of the new features we may want to advertise in future...

comments from jglick@netscape.com 2001-02-09 12:12 sound good to me.

That patch should be final, please sr/r. Thanks!

sr=bienvenu

Until someone else checks this in for me, :-) here's a screenshot so those of you who can't build can see the end result.

fix checked in r=timeless

Build 2001-02-19-08: NT4, Mac 9.04 Verified Fixed, the entire line is linked. Bug# 67711 on Linux: There is a known problem with items not appearing linked but they are. It's just that the underline is not appearing. Since a single word is no longer linkified then I'll assume that the issue in this bug is fixed.