Weekly Status Report, W25/2007

This is interesting stuff. Thanks for keeping us posted. I'm looking forward to SeaMonkey 2.0.

I was reading the bugs about the German localization, and a couple things strike me. One is that it seems odd that an Austrian and a German are trying to collaborate on a German translation. Now, my knowledge of German is very low (I love how it sounds and have studied it, but my talent for languages is way too low to learn it), but it seems like it would be equivalent of getting an American and a Canadian to agree on the words to use in an English version (AFAIK, the German translation is de-AT, Austrian German, nicht war?).

It's also interesting that you mention in one of the threads that German doesn't have a word for website. That's probably a good thing. In Esperanto, there are words for website and web browser, but the problems occur when non-technical people talk about them, because they seem to not know the difference between the web and the Internet. So, "web sites" are commonly named "Internet sites," which is OK (if imprecise), but a less OK situation occurs when the said non-technical people use the word for "Internet suite" when talking about standalone browsers. The technically savvy try to educate, but there are just too many people who don't understand or are unwilling to. And I'd imagine, you'd have the same problem in German if there became standard German terms for those concepts.

Another thing is the form controls. One thing that I'm seeing that I don't think is actually a problem but I don't like is that the modern theme is using native controls instead of the old modern widgets. I liked the modern widgets better, to be honest. In fact, I think the modern theme is so cool. I don't think I'd want to theme my entire desktop in it, because that would be too monotonous, having all applications look the same. But I love it when I'm using the suite.

Oh well, I think that concludes my rambling. Thanks for keeping us suite lovers updated with this blog. I, for one, appreciate it.

For the form controls, I think this is completely done by code that is not theme-aware, so not much we can do about it, unfortunately.

For Austria/Germany: There is no real difference in the official language between the two countries, there are some words here and there that are not commonly used by the other or regionally used words, but esp. for computer UIs, there was never a language difference between versions for Austria and Germany, and the language is practically identical for both.
If you go to day-to-day language (esp. food, etc.) the differences get bigger, but we rearely need things like cream topics in browser UI
Really big differences would be in casual language or dialects, but not in the officially standardized language ("Hochdeutsch", which sometimes is said to be "the first foreign language" that Austrians learn - as most of us speak dialects with sometimes rather large differences to official German).