[haiku-doc] Re: Another try at user guide translations

Hello Humdinger,
Once again, I've been thinking on how to organize translations of the user guide... After much pondering on what's necessary to create a website and its database back-end to keep all translations in sync, I realized that it quickly becomes too complex to be easily implemented, especially considering I have no idea how to actually code such things.
I actually began working on a translation tool for Haiku documentation some time ago :) My idea was to use the XML parsing tools provided by PHP to find translatable parts of each document, and tag them (in a copy of the original file) with an ID (see below). If one of these parts is moved in the document, it will still get the same ID (unless its content changes, of course) in the tagged file, and so it will still be translated. To translate some parts of the document, the translator loads the tagged file in its browser. The source code of this page looks like something like this : 
   [snip]
   <div class="title" _translate_id="42">Welcome to Haiku !</div>
   [snip]
A JavaScript code (which is embedded at the end of the <head> tag) adds a border around translatable items (by looking for the _translate_id attributes). When the user clicks on one of these items, it opens a window where the inner HTML of the item can be translated. After this, it uses some AJAX to send the translation to the server, which then updates its database (after checking for XML well-formedness).
Generating translated files is easy : the script loads the tagged file, and replaces for instance <sometag with_attributes _translation_id="42">Hello World!</sometag> with <sometag with_attributes>Bonjour Monde !</sometag> (again, only using XML DOM, not black magic with strings).
So what do you think ? I had done a prototype which seems to works fine, but got very busy before having a chance to test it thoroughly. I can send you the URL if you are interested (I will not post it here since the admin panel is completely unprotected for now ;) 

Vincent

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