This section contains some tips and general recommendations for webmasters in no particular order—it is not mandatory to follow them, but doing so will make translators' lives substantially easier.
First and foremost, respect translators' work—it is ungrateful and hard, undoubtedly much harder than translation of programs. It is important to have as many and as better as possible translations, and you don't have to make titanic efforts to help.
If you plan to edit a certain page extensively, please do so within the period between two adjacent GNUN builds—i.e. within a day. That way, the POT will be regenerated only once, and translators who are quick to update it immediately won't be disappointed if it changes again in the next run.
Use only US-ASCII characters and HTML entities for the others. This is required because the English text in the articles serves as a replacement of the translation when the latter is not complete. So if you use, say, the character é (e-acute) directly in an English page—which is UTF-8 as declared in server/head-include-1.html, it will appear broken on those translated pages who use a different encoding. This specific advice is pretty much mandatory—the build fails if the original article contains such characters—but we are ready to fix any errors a webmaster makes.
The script gnun-validate-html is useful for webmasters who want to verify if their (potentially intrusive) changes result in a valid markup. Before committing your changes, you can check if it is valid by running
gnun-validate-html philosophy/not-ipr.html
See gnun-validate-html, for more information.
If you want a comment to be visible for translators, place it inside the element, for example:
<p>
<!--TRANSLATORS: Note that foo is bar in this context.-->
The fooish bar mumbles bazzling.
</p>
This will result in:
# type: Content of: <p>
#. TRANSLATORS: Note that foo is bar in this context.
msgid "The fooish bar mumbles bazzling."
msgstr ""
As per the established convention, start the comment with
TRANSLATORS: to catch their attention, and do not add a space
after the beginning of the HTML comment (<!--), since this will
unnecessarily indent the comment in the POT.
Warning: Any structural diversion from boilerplate.html in a specific article is likely to result in errors from GNUN. Any unexpected updates to the server templates (such as changing the entire look & feel of the site) will most probably break all translations under GNUN's control. Of course, this does not mean that such changes should not happen—only that they must be applied in our sandbox first, to ensure a smooth transition.