At 2009-02-16 17:06 +0000, Andrew Welch wrote:
Regarding localisation support in xslt, I've always thought we could
take advantage of dynamic despatch, import precedence or template
priorities etc

Here's a simple example:



<xsl:stylesheet version="2.0"
    xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
    xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
    xmlns:f="f"
    exclude-result-prefixes="xs f">

    <xsl:param name="locale" select="'en_GB'"/>



    <xsl:variable name="lang" select="tokenize($locale, '_')[1]"/>
    <xsl:variable name="country" select="tokenize($locale, '_')[2]"/>

    <xsl:function name="f:getLocalisation" as="xs:string">
        <xsl:param name="key" as="xs:string"/>

        <xsl:variable name="lookup">
            <xsl:element name="{$country}">
                <xsl:element name="{$lang}">
                    <xsl:element name="{$key}"/>
                </xsl:element>
            </xsl:element>
        </xsl:variable>

        <xsl:apply-templates select="$lookup/*/*"/>
    </xsl:function>

    <xsl:template match="/">
            <xsl:value-of select="f:getLocalisation('page.title')"/>
    </xsl:template>

    <xsl:template match="page.title">Default Title</xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="en/page.title">General English page
title</xsl:template>
    <xsl:template match="US/en/page.title">Specific US English page
title</xsl:template>

The second and third match above will cause a template conflict 
because they both have an implicit priority=".5".  Your most specific 
match, the third one, should have a higher explicit priority.



</xsl:stylesheet>



The key ("page.title" here) and the locale is passed in as a
parameter.  The localised values are stored as templates.  The key and
locale are converted into elements, and then the apply-templates call
is made on that temporary tree... and then the rest is taken care of.

I suppose ... the localization information is in a data file 
indicated by an invocation parameter.  You are relying on XSLT 2 or 
an extension.



I'm supporting fourteen languages for the United Nations Layout Key 
for Invoice, using 14 differently-named top-level stylesheets:



  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/resources/ublss/#ubl2-ss
  Bosnian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French,
  German, Icelandic, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Slovak
  and Spanish

Of course everything is modular and I use the stylesheet importation 
to override the English base strings with whatever strings are 
available in the given language.  Volunteers have submitted the 
language translations just by editing a small prototypical stylesheet 
fragment with only global variable declarations ... most of them 
don't know XSLT.



Any ideas on how to improve this?

What benefit are you looking for by which improvement could be measured?



. . . . . . . . . . . . Ken



--
Upcoming hands-on  XQuery, XSLT, UBL & code list training classes:
Brussels, BE 2009-03;  Prague, CZ 2009-03, http://www.xmlprague.cz
Training tools: Comprehensive interactive XSLT/XPath 1.0/2.0 video
Video lesson:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrNjJCh7Ppg&fmt=18
Video overview:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTiodiij6gE&fmt=18
G. Ken Holman                 mailto:gkholman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Crane Softwrights Ltd.          http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/
Male Cancer Awareness Nov'07  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/s/bc
Legal business disclaimers:  http://www.CraneSoftwrights.com/legal