Hi, I dont respond often on this list, but I thought the following information may be useful...

OK ... during the bugsquash session the issue of charsets came up. (in response to 885:; Non-ISO8859-1 charset support broken in CSS theme in 2.2). Our goal for 2.4 would be to move everything--db storage, and templates -- to utf-8. The question is, how?

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So we're looking for suggestions on how to make the switch. What do we need to consider:

HTML::Template limitations (should we be looking at Template::Toolkit) Database Issues Translation Issues Other stuff

At my work we provide a browser-based application which is translated into a number of languages. Some of the interesting points: - we only support UTF8 as the charset, as any other charset in simply insufficient (Google does this too). - all translations are stored within a database table, then have the template lookup any static text (text generated from within Perl, can be translated before being sent to the templates. - since templates lookup their own translations, you dont need a template-per-language. - since translations are stored within a database, you can update the translations at run-time, without needing to restart / reload your updated translations - web access to the database translations allow multiple people to localise the translations, at the same time. - right-to-left text is also easily supported To do some of these, we modified HTML::Template to suport custom TMPL_xxx tags, so that we could implement a tag for the static text lookup. ie: our templates look like: ... <TMPL_CATGETS "A phrase containing a template variable [_1], that gets inserted here",some_var> ... where some_var is a Perl generated TMPL_VAR value. We combine H::T with the Locale::MakePhrase module so that the output can handle singular / plural / etc based on the string/numeric value of some_var. For some extra information, go here: http://members.optusnet.com.au/mathew Hope this helps, Mathew PS. Some languages, particularily Asian languages, contain many pen-strokes within a glyph. Often these languages need the text point-size to be slightly larger than European languages... this is just a tidbit that I have found through experience, particularily if a single template is to be used for every language.