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[lojban-beginners] Re: Firefox Add-on: Lojban Popup Dictionary
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.