From nobody@digitalkingdom.org Sun Jul 29 07:20:26 2007 Received: with ECARTIS (v1.0.0; list lojban-beginners); Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:20:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from nobody by chain.digitalkingdom.org with local (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IF9dA-0008Eu-IK for lojban-beginners-real@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:20:25 -0700 Received: from smtp1.isgenesis.com ([168.215.170.6] helo=isgenesis.com) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.67) (envelope-from ) id 1IF9d5-0008Eg-AE for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 07:20:23 -0700 Received: from [168.215.170.1] (account ccd HELO [10.222.0.214]) by isgenesis.com (CommuniGate Pro SMTP 5.1.5) with ESMTPSA id 2866988 for lojban-beginners@lojban.org; Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:20:18 -0500 Message-ID: <46ACA21E.1000508@spamcop.net> Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2007 09:20:14 -0500 From: Charles Duffy User-Agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.5 (Windows/20070716) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban-beginners@lojban.org Subject: [lojban-beginners] Re: Firefox Add-on: Lojban Popup Dictionary References: <2f91285f0707281957s4cda109ep1666a9ea43b683a0@mail.gmail.com> <1185712338.46ac88d24f207@ssl0.ovh.net> In-Reply-To: <1185712338.46ac88d24f207@ssl0.ovh.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Spam-Score: 1.8 X-Spam-Score-Int: 18 X-Spam-Bar: + X-archive-position: 5268 X-ecartis-version: Ecartis v1.0.0 Sender: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org Errors-to: lojban-beginners-bounce@lojban.org X-original-sender: cduffy@spamcop.net Precedence: bulk Reply-to: lojban-beginners@lojban.org X-list: lojban-beginners m.kornig@sondal.net wrote: > Well I'm not an expert in Add-Ons. But I guess it would > demand some serious work, even if you just wanted it to > work for Lojban-English translations. You would need to > provide a Lojban-English dictionary (probably in form > of a data base) to start with. I don't even know whether > such a dictionary/data base exists... > The gismu list is easily parsable. > The gismu list I know of has a lot strange English > phrasings in it and would not be very helpful, I'm afraid. > Really? How so? I'd think that just coming up with an entry from said list would be adequate -- but if it isn't, users could submit replacement entries for use by the tool; if I were to write it, though, I'd certainly use the gismu list as a starting point. > Also, I don't know WHO could do the job. The existing > Add-Ons are probably provided by the FireFox company (if > this exists?). I doubt that they would bother about a > clear minority language such as Lojban. > Firefox add-ons can be written by anyone. Remember, it's an open source browser -- and the addons are open-source as well, so someone can take a preexisting translation add-on and just start hacking. Portable add-ons (and we certainly want something like this to be portable) need to be written in JavaScript; if one doesn't care so much about portability, native plugins can be written in C++ (or in combinations of C++ and other languages with support for a C interface, but that's getting ugly... ahh, who are we kidding? C++ is ugly in and of itself). So as for who can do the job, pretty much anyone who knows JavaScript and has some spare time. I'm not ideal -- my JavaScript is very rusty (I'm mostly a C and Python coder), and spare time is something I rarely come by.