Requests for comment/Localisation format

This is an RfC on a JSON based localisation format and structure for MediaWiki core and extensions, based on the work to create jQuery.i18n. There will be no loss of internationalisation or localisation functionality in this change.

Rationale
The current MediaWiki localisation files are based on PHP arrays. Having PHP arrays makes the localisation files not directly usable in JavaScript, which will be a follow-up stage to this change. Having JSON as the MediaWiki file format will make it easier to integrate modularly-developed functionality into MediaWiki, while preserving all the rich internationalisation features MediaWiki currently enjoys.

The largest i18n files in extensions currently contain localisations for 200 or more languages, have a size in the megabytes, and have several tens of thousands lines (for example  is 3.8 MiB and over 18,000 lines, and   is 3.4 MiB and over 32,000 lines). These large files are hard to edit for developers altering existing English messages and adding new ones, and slow to process for MediaWiki and others. A change in one translation in an extension could for example no longer trigger a re-cache of all languages any more, as we can track timestamps per language after this change. This benefit applies to MediaWiki core as well as to translatewiki.net. While handling JSON may be slower than using PHP (we have no benchmarks on this), overall this change can improve performance by avoiding loading unnecessary data, as data for each language is held in a separate file.

Additionally, using executable PHP files is a potential security risk. Loading the messages for translation at translatewiki.net and any other kind of manipulation is icky.

Out of scope

 * Representation in resource loader for i18n files; a separate RfC will be submitted for this.

Requirements
Requirements are at least the following:
 * 1) The scope of this RfC is limited to.
 * 2) The messages should be stored in a non-executable UTF-8 file format.
 * 3) MediaWiki core and individual extensions should be able to have multiple groups of messages, located in an advised standard structure (for example,  ).
 * 4) All current MediaWiki i18n features must keep working.
 * 5) The current extension localisation format should keep working  for backward compatibility purposes.
 * 6) The new format will be mandatory for all Wikimedia deployed code.
 * 7) Conversion scripts should be made available, and be performed for all Wikimedia-deployed extensions, expected by the time of the branching of MediaWiki 1.24.

Proposal
The proposal is as follows
 * We will use UTF-8 JSON files using the same syntax that is used by jQuery.i18n, https://github.com/wikimedia/jquery.i18n. This provides complete support for  and basic authoring information, but does not support all the edges of the MessagesEn.php files, which will remain (replacing them is out-of-scope for this RfC).
 * The JSON translation files will be stored with actual human-readable Unicode characters and not Unicode character numbers. If this is a problem, it should be a job of for example ResourceLoader to resolve this.
 * Each locale will be stored in its own file, even though the jquery.i18n file format specifies that it is also possible to put all locales in the same file.
 * Extension messages files will be expected in general to be in a directory called  in the root of the extension's repo, split by language (,  ,  , etc.), with support for multiple sub-directories for splitting up into keyed groups, auto-loaded.
 * Groups' keys are locally-scoped, allowing only, and auto-generated from the name of the sub-directory (if appropriate); the primary group will be automatically named the same as the extension. If you want to refer to default group distinctly from the extension's whole set of modules, refer to it outright (named other than  ).
 * We will introduce a new configuration variable,,  which allows the directory/directories for the extension to be loaded.   will continue to work but will be ignored in   if the same key is specified in.
 * Implementation will be completed in advance of the release of MediaWiki 1.23, running in dual-support mode. As MW 1.23 will be an LTS release, this will ensure that users of existing extensions will be able to use them unaltered for several years.
 * Support for the old PHP based file format will be retired in MediaWiki 1.24.
 * The old PHP based localisation format for $messages will be considered deprecated starting with MediaWiki version 1.23.0.
 * Write conversion script to convert from PHP arrays to JSON files, and run it on all Wikimedia-deployed extensions. Complex splits (e.g. for MediaWiki core and VisualEditor) will be done manually by the Language Engineering and VisualEditor teams.
 * maintenance/language/messages.inc will become obsolete.
 * maintenance/language/messageTypes.inc will be converted to translatewiki.net configuration.
 * $messages of languages/messages/MessagesXx.php core files will be converted into in i18n/xx.json. Conversion of other properties maintained in MessagesXx.php is out of scope of this RfC.
 * The installer i18n will be migrated to i18n/installer/xx.json.
 * jquery.i18n JSON could support fuzzy tags, but it does not at the moment. In the future, this could be implemented using an array in the @metadata.
 * The current extension localisation format should keep working for backward compatibility purposes, and converted extensions would get backward compatibility code. With an extension that has   defined, running a conversion script would suggest code like this for  :

Examples
An extension with multiple groups of messages might choose to split its files up as follows:
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages/cclicensetexts
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages/wikimediatemporarymessages
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages/cclicensetexts
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages/wikimediatemporarymessages
 * This will be loaded as wikimediamessages/wikimediatemporarymessages

The extension would load its values using. This is short for, and would load all message files in the above example automatically, including the namespacing.

A more complex use case is for extensions that use libraries, where moving the internationalisation files into the root of the extension would split the import and make things more complicated. A (slightly artificial) example might be:

For this example, the messages files would be loaded using:

Implementations
Support for this in MediaWiki core is being implemented in gerrit change 102098.

Splitting the messages file into JSON has been done for the VisualEditor project in a spike version, alongside a shim that lets the  file still be used as a bridge to the JSON files. Note that this is intentionally a more complicated case than most extensions will need as VisualEditor itself has been split three ways ahead of a repo split, and the messages for OOjs UI are also present. The switch over to using the forthcoming core support in VisualEditor is trivial.

The Wikimania Scholarships application is using the JSON file format as of 2013-12-18.