339833 - Localizability issues with month and weekday name letter cases

Status: NEW

(Calendar :: General, defect)

Description

[Jussi Bergström]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fi; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060426 Firefox/1.5.0.3
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fi-FI; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060507 Mozilla Sunbird/0.3a2

At least in Finnish, months and weekdays are not considered proper nouns, so mid-sentence, they appear entirely in lowercase.

However, Sunbird doesn't provide means of localizing weekdays and months in initial and mid-sentence positions separately.

If weekday and month names are localized in lowercase, they will be all lowercase for example in calendar view headings. On the other hand, lowercase names also occur mid-sentence, for example in the Recurrence dialog.

There should either be two sets of these names, or Sunbird should automatically convert their first character to uppercase if they occur by themselves or as the first word.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Matthew (lilmatt) Willis]

Can you generate a list of places where we would need a second uncapitalized entity for the month or day name?

Comment 2

[Jussi Bergström]

All forms of both weekdays and months need to have lowercase and initial capital versions where applicable (Monday: maanantai, ma, m, Maanantai, Ma, M; January: tammikuu, tammi, Tammikuu, Tammi).

I'll try to list here as many places as I can find.

First letter uppercase:
* Minicalendar month name
* Minicalendar weekday headings
* Day view: weekday browser
* Month view: month browser
* Day & Week views: abbreviated weekday in the day column heading
* Multiweek & Month: weekday name
* Month view: abrreviated month name on first and last days

All lowercase:
* All dates with month or weekday names (see below, though)
* Everywhere in the Recurrence dialog, except (possibly) in weekly recurrence checkboxes
* If the UI will ever include strings where weekday or month names occur mid-sentence, these will need lowercase forms as well

It seems, however, that some dates are parsed by the OS, since unifinder lists today as "31. toukokuuta 2006". Here the notable thing is that in dates, Finnish grammar reqiures the month name to receive the pertitive suffix -ta, and I certainly haven't put that in any of the l10n files.

Comment 3

[Cédric Corazza]

I guess bug 338167 have addressed most of the Reccurrence Dialog issues

Comment 4

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

I think there are actually more issues. For example, in Lithuanian, month names need to be declined differently in e.g. "July 2008" (2008 m. liepa) than in "July 28, 2008" (2008 m. liepos 28 d.).

I think it would be nice to be able to define all possible forms of those words (and their combinations) in one file (or two – one .dtd and one .properties), so that they could be used all around.

Comment 5

[Philipp Kewisch [:Fallen][☁️📆]]

Rimas, Jussi, given we have had some improvements on declension, is this bug still an issue?

Comment 6

[Rimas Kudelis [use needinfo to ping]]

I'd rather defer the decision to Jussi since I'm not using Calendar myself, and I don't have spare energy to make it work with my Thunderbird beta, at least today.