Meeting Agenda : 2022-02-14

[eemeli]

Unicode MessageFormat WG - Weekly Meeting

Start time: 18:30 CET / 9:30 PT

Call : Link

This is the second weekly meeting of the WG, and will focus on message references; a feature previously agreed upon in the first two consensus decisions of the WG.

Message references are rather variably supported in our current spec proposals:

• Eemeli: syntax / data model / value resolution / message selection
• Staś: not included
• Mihai: example of message references via custom user-defined formatting function

Questions that may be answered by this discussion:

• Should message references be included in the specification?
• Should message references be included as their own entity in the data model?
• How far can a message reference reach (i.e. only to messages in same group/same resource/anywhere)?
• Should a message reference be able to set/define variables for the referred message?
• What is the resolved value of a message reference (a formatted string, a stringifiable object with metadata, or something else)?
• Can message references be used as selector values?
• Can the resolved metadata value of a message reference be used as a selector value?

If you have additional questions in mind, please post them in comments below. I'll send a poll about these to the mailing list in the next few days, to get a bit of a baseline on where we're starting from.

[eemeli]

@mihnita Did you have specific thoughts about the multiple-choice answers you wanted to be incldued?

[stasm]

To clarify: I'm also proposing that message references be implementable via custom functions.

I have a few ideas for additional questions, possibly with an open-text comment field to provide more thoughts under the answer. They're about the use-case we see for message references. Perhaps it should be a single multiple-choice question instead?

• Should message references be used to remedy the issue of combinatorial explosion?
• Should message references solve the use-case of accessing a glossary of common translated terms (e.g. common names, colors, qualities, objects, products, etc.)?
• Should message references be used for consistency in branding?
• Should message references solve the use-case of Click __continue__ to proceed, where __continue__ is the literal text from another part of the UI that we want to repeat?

[eemeli]

@stasm I added your questions each as separate ones: https://forms.gle/D9vVAHXxjXoq3hLP6