1178119 - Don't force capitalization of localized text in Firefox for iOS

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for iOS :: General, defect)

Description

[Kevin Scannell]

Attachment: Screenshot of Firefox on iOS in Irish

Reporting specifically for Irish, but other languages have similar issues; cf bug 830002 and bug 1014639.  I'm running version 1.0 (22) of Firefox, on iOS 8.3.

Here's the translation as it appears in Pootle:

http://mozilla.locamotion.org/ga_IE/ios/translate/#unit=13447042

Last week = An tseachtain seo caite

In all caps, this should look like "AN tSEACHTAIN SEO CAITE"  (small "t").  See attached screenshot.

Comment 1

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Moving to Firefox OS - General, because there's actually nothing on your side that you can do to fix this.

I think it might be a duplicate of an existing bug about custom/per-locale CSS rules

Comment 2

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Jet-lagged brain... Firefox for IOS, not Firefox OS.

Comment 3

[Jeff Beatty [:gueroJeff]]

Could you look into this? It seems to be seriously affected some locales.

Comment 4

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Update: this is something that's hard to fix without new strings that are naturally in the desired case (which is how it should have been done to start with).

We're past string freeze, so this'll ship for a few weeks in 1.0 and we'll fix it for 1.1.

Sorry for the pain :/

Comment 5

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Tried NSString.uppercaseStringWithLocale() as a quick fix but that has the exact same results as NSString.uppercaseString()

Comment 6

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Stef,

When you added uppercaseStringWithLocale, did you pass in NSLocale.currentLocale into the method?

If that doesn't work, would the solution for this issue be to remove any 'force' capitalization (calls to uppcaseString() we make in our code and rely on the strings provided from localizers for this?

Comment 7

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

Yeah I tried uppercaseStringWithLocale(s, NSLocale.currentLocale()) and that did not give the expected results. Simply the whole string would be uppercased.

I think it would be good if you could take another peek at that quickly. Maybe there is more to it. But if not then yeah lets just ask the localizers to do an uppercase version for those strings and get rid of uppercaseString() calls in our code.

Comment 8

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Wait do we want just the first letter capitalized? For that we would use capitalizedStringWithLocale instead (https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Cocoa/Reference/Foundation/Classes/NSString_Class/#//apple_ref/occ/instm/NSString/capitalizedStringWithLocale:).

Comment 9

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

No, this is TITLE CAPS.

I tried a few variations in the playground, all of which were wrong. The only good solution is for localizers to do the work.

Comment 10

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Stephan Leroux [:sleroux] from comment #6)
> If that doesn't work, would the solution for this issue be to remove any
> 'force' capitalization (calls to uppcaseString() we make in our code and
> rely on the strings provided from localizers for this?

Yes. Also consider that some locales simply don't like uppercase, and I have yet to find an usability study that confirms if using uppercase to convey meaning makes sense ("look, I'm an header" or "I'm more important than what's around me").

Just to give you a glance of the complexity using CSS
http://codepen.io/flodolo/pen/KpqYjX

Given Webkit's poor support, I'd be kind of surprised to find iOS in better shape.

Comment 11

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/977

Removing uppercaseString calls changes the following strings from being uppercased:

L268 - HistoryPanel.swift
NSLocalizedString("Today", comment: "History tableview section header")
NSLocalizedString("Yesterday", comment: "History tableview section header")
NSLocalizedString("Last week", comment: "History tableview section header")
NSLocalizedString("Last month", comment: "History tableview section header")

L159 - SearchSettingsTableViewController.swift
NSLocalizedString("Default Search Engine", comment: "Title for default search engine settings section.")
NSLocalizedString("Quick-search Engines", comment: "Title for quick-search engines settings section.")

L815 - SettingsTableViewController
NSLocalizedString("General", comment: "General settings section title")
NSLocalizedString("Support", comment: "Support section title")
NSLocalizedString("About", comment: "About settings section title")
NSLocalizedString("Privacy", comment: "Privacy section title")

Comment 12

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Does English still wants to use uppercase? In that case we need new strings like TODAY, YESTERDAY, etc. (without removing the existing one, per discussion on branching for v-whatever-the-next-version-is).

Comment 13

[Richard Newman [:rnewman]]

Robin's call.

Comment 14

[Robin Andersen [:tecgirl]]

No, we don't need to stick with all caps in English. Sentence case (Today, Yesterday, Last week, Last month) is fine.

Comment 15

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

Comment on attachment 8652857 [details] [review]
https://github.com/mozilla/firefox-ios/pull/977

Looks good to me.

Comment 16

[Stefan Arentz | :st3fan | ⏰ EST | he/him]

As part of this fix, shouldn't we also change the strings to uppercase so that the localizers know that they need to uppercase their versions?

Comment 17

[Francesco Lodolo [:flod]]

(In reply to Stefan Arentz [:st3fan] from comment #16)
> As part of this fix, shouldn't we also change the strings to uppercase so
> that the localizers know that they need to uppercase their versions?

I think we just agreed that English won't use uppercase (comment 14), so I don't see locales using uppercase either.

Comment 18

[Stephan Leroux [:sleroux]]

Merged