Introducing Project Fluent

[Staś Małolepszy]

tl;dr: L20n's syntax, parser and the formatter will from now on
be developed as a new project called Project Fluent.

Hi all --

L20n has seen a lot of interest from inside and outside of Mozilla and
we'd like to make it easier for people to integrate into their
projects.

For HTML/JS apps, deciding to use L20n.js means buying into a whole
paradigm change: the localization happens on the client side and is
async, it is declarative and bound to DOM. If you happen to use an
opinionated UI framework, it might be hard to integrate L20n into
it—L20n comes with its own opinions. For non-HTML apps, there's no DOM
and the IO and platform integration are different anyways, and so only
a subset of L20n is relevant there anyways.

Many of us believe that L20n is what the future of localization will
look like, in particular on the Web. To ease adoption and in order to
be able to start a wider-spread promotion of the FTL syntax, we will
extract the low-level API powering L20n into its own project: Project
Fluent. We will continue developing the syntax and reference
implementations there and we will continue building L20n.js on top of
it (we might rename it to something like fluent-dom at some point).

For now, I created a new repository of the FTL syntax specification at
https://github.com/projectfluent/syntax. The current state of the
syntax (as of mid-January 2017) has been tagged as version 0.1 of the
specification. We are now working towards releasing a version 0.2
which has the improvements discussed in this list in December and in
January. Future versions might introduce small changes but in general
we will be aiming at keeping them as backward-compatible as possible.
I will also release the contents of L20n's src/ftl (the parser) and
src/intl (the formatter) as a stand-alone JS library soon. The python
parser will follow after that.

You can read more about Project Fluent on the wiki:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fluent.

Please let us know what would make Project Fluent work for your project!

-stas