881074 - make the recipient address separator in the message list columns of 'Recipient', 'To', 'CC', 'Bcc' localizable

Status: NEW

(MailNews Core :: Backend, defect)

Description

[:aceman]

+++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #522886 comment 2 +++

-- Suyash Agarwal (:sshagarwal) 2013-06-08 20:29:53 CEST

The multiple addresses in the recipient and To columns are separated by only a comma "," which doesn't look readable at the first look, can I make the separator to be ", " i.e. comma followed by a space?

-- :aceman 2013-06-08 21:02:24 CEST

For the "," delimiter I would think it should also be made localizable.

-- Thomas D. 2013-06-09 11:10:27 CEST

+1, it should be ", " with space as a default. I'd lean towards making it localizable / customizable as a pref, but I don't have a strong opinion on that. Having the pref would allow users to choose a delimiter which suits their local or individual needs best, e.g. to pick semicolon "; " instead of comma ", " or even to pick an entirely different separator like " | " for added salience.

-- Thomas D. 2013-06-09 14:53:25 CEST

> (In reply to Thomas D. from comment #8)
> > +1, it should be ", " with space as a default. I'd lean towards making it
> > localizable / customizable as a pref, but I don't have a strong opinion ... 
However, in terms of correct localization it might still be needed with the arrival of international email addresses (1), which are no longer limited to the classic ASCII character set of the English Alphabet. And looking at languages like Chinese, they don't use the same punctuation marks as English either (2)(3), so using comma for enumerations is actually odd for such languages. E.g. for Chinese:
> ， (U+FF0C FULLWIDTH COMMA) is the comma (,). It cannot be used for enumerating
> a list; see "enumeration comma"

Just my 2 cents. I acknowledge it's just dotting the i's and we can certainly ignore this for now and wait until we get a localization bug for that.

(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_email
(2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comma_%28punctuation%29
(3) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_punctuation

-- Blake Winton (:bwinton) 2013-06-09 15:20:39 CEST

", " seems better to me.  I'm -1 on adding a pref for it, but localizability seems like the right thing to do.

-- Thomas D. 2013-06-09 16:03:05 CEST

(In reply to :aceman from comment #15)
> Yes, that is what I meant: localizability (hardcoded string per language),
> not preference.

+1 if that means getting the string from some sort of language resource file (dtd etc.).