Now with UI Controls for 40 Languages Via the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit
Windows Live Messenger Now with UI Controls for 40 Languages Via the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit
Microsoft has expanded the list of languages supported by the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit to no less than 40 items. Siebe Tolsma, software development engineer, Messenger Web Platform, announced that developers would be able to tailor Windows Live Messenger to their websites in accordance with specific languages. Microsoft even provides a list with all the supported languages available for the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit.
“We are very excited to announce that in total over 40 new languages are available for the UI Controls, as well as greatly improving support for right-to-left languages! Because localization is such a hip new feature, we have also decided to update the version of the library to 3.1,” Tolsma stated.
The Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit allows web developers and webmasters to include Windows Live Messenger into websites and allow users to IM seamlessly even without having Microsoft's instant messaging client installed. Now with the added language support, users can also get a personalized experience. All that devs need to do is to point the loader to: http://www.wlmesenger.net/api/3.1/loader.js.
“Once you’re pointing to the new version of the library, there are several supported ways of getting the language you want, depending on the way you interact with the library. The first and easiest is to either add the lang or the xml:lang attribute to the html tag. For most developers this is the preferred choice. Please note that for some languages, such as Hebrew, you will also have to include the dir attribute in the tag to make your page use right-to-left,” Tolsma added.
Another method involves the manual initialization of the loader. Tolsma also explained that Microsoft meant to introduce some changes to the mark-up and style sheets of the UI Controls. The Redmond company considered the modifications necessary as it worked to accommodate the specific features of all the languages supported. The software giant explained that those leveraging the default styles of the Windows Live Messenger Web Toolkit were in no way impacted by the changes. Not the same is valid for developers that are styling UI controls on their own.
“To localize the sign in control button, we had to swap the single sign in button image for regular HTML. If you are using the text-only version of the sign in control (by setting the size=”small” attribute) then this should not affect you,” Tolsma noted. “In case you went all out and also styled the credits dialog (available by clicking on the Windows Live Messenger logo in the bar and selecting “About Messenger” in the menu), then you should be aware that the Windows Live Logo in the credits dialog has been moved outside the enclosing DIV. A new CSS class has been added to the display name control to make styling easier. The new class is applied to the A element which contains the link to the user or contacts profile in case linked is set to true in the msgr:display-name tag. The new CSS class is DisplayNameControl_ProfileLink.”
Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (2009) is available for download via this LINK
