It’s more than a little strange that Tumblr supports (well, “supports”) localization for theme content, but not for any custom variables that you might define. I guess I just have to blindly hope that my theme’s non-English-speaking users can all figure out what “Mobile Styles Everywhere” means, instead of presenting the option text to them in their own respective languages.
I guess those who cannot remember gettext are condemned to reimplement it, poorly.
I’m not sure how long this has been around, but Tumblr has some support for localizing themes, which means that you can write a single theme that supports all of the languages that Tumblr does. At least that’s how it works in theory. I say this because strings like the following indicate that it’s not at all complete:
{lang:Posted on DayOfMonth Month Year}
{lang:Posted on Month DayOfMonth Year}
I see things like this way too often, so let me say it loud and clear: The order of date elements varies from language to language. American English typically uses month-day-year (“February 17, 2012”), while in German the commonly accepted order is DMY (“17. Februar 2012”). A Tumblr theme can’t support both of these conventions without language-specific switching, which is what localization strings are supposed to eliminate in the first place.
Japanese date support is especially bad, for two reasons. First, the order is invariably year-month-day, which Tumblr doesn’t even provide an option for. Second, Japanese and Chinese require the use of date component suffixes when writing out full dates: 年 for the year, 月 for the month, and 日 for the day of the month. (Korean does this as well, except with hangul spellings for the Chinese characters.) A properly-formatted date looks like this:
2012年2月17日
Instead, at best, what Tumblr gives you is something like this:
17 2月 2012
The incorrect order is obvious; the month is the only element that retains its suffix because it’s allowed to be an arbitrary string of characters, while the other components are required to be numeric.
I don’t mean to rag specifically on Tumblr for this; it’s a problem I’ve encountered in numerous places, but one that stuck out to me here since I’ve been working on Dichotomy a little more lately. The proper solution is to have differing levels of detail for each template tag, not a specific order. Most operating systems have options for “short” (“2/17/2012”), “medium” (“February 17, 2012”), and “full” (“Friday, February 17, 2012”) date formats, and I think that’s the best example to follow here.
That’s all. I’ll leave the complaining about not having a template tag
for ISO 8601 date formatting (which I need for <time>) for another
day.