useOptionalT's fallback (the path a bundle with no vue-i18n takes) picked a plural form by English's
rule for every locale, so "21 народ" and Arabic's six forms came out wrong there — regions caught it
before wiring their wall. The fallback now uses the SAME CLDR selection library/i18n/index.js installs
(cldrChoiceIndex, now exported), and English keeps vue-i18n's own rule, so both paths print the same
form. Checked against the real code: ru 1/3/5/21, ar 0/2/5/11, en 0/1/7.
The i18n + RTL audit of Country Posters (the hardcoded-English gate only reads production plugins,
so it had never read this one; its scanner was run on the plugin directly and every hit triaged for
reachability, since the country map mounts one tab):
- 9 strings a reader sees were English in every locale: the search placeholder, the packet title's
"— 50 of N", the map-failed message, the wall's heading, tag, intro, soon message and item nouns,
and the view switcher's legend and label. All read from the catalogue now, reusing the existing
keys where they exist (tabs.selectView/views, the UPG-100 wall's tag and emphasis).
- The wall's section headings are the WAGF region labels in the data, English everywhere; they now
resolve through the Regions dashboard's own WAGF table, which gains its two missing regions.
- The three WAGF tier tooltips had no keys in any locale (legend.tabInfo.region/block/country).
- 0 physical-CSS findings.
PosterWall counted "N countries" as a number plus a 2-form noun pair and defaulted the plural to
noun + "s" — wrong for Russian and Arabic whatever strings it was given. It takes itemCountKey, a
plural catalogue key rendered with the count; useOptionalT forwards a plural count to vue-i18n (the
CLDR map picks ru 4 forms, ar 6, zh 1), and a host without i18n picks the English form by
vue-i18n's own rule. The people-group counts on the section heads and placeholder cards use
wall.peopleGroupCount the same way ("people groups" was hardcoded English on the cards).
The UPG-100 wall: its Americas and Europe section headings had no key (single words, invisible to
the gate), and it counts its lists with wall.listCount.
Checked: plural-forms, i18n-parity, keys-exist, never-translated, and i18n-treeshake against both
bundles built (26 bundles carry every area they ask for); gates:pre 66/66.
gospel-plugin's decision, in their words: "most partners will drop a custom
element or an iframe and never install vue-i18n ... an Arabic ministry site
embedding this map serves its readers English while the bundle already carries all
11 catalogues. That is a bug, not a decision."
So all four gospel translators drop `{ fallback: enLookup }` and take the
helper's catalogue default, which resolves through tStatic: the reader's locale
first, English as the last resort. Their three conditions are met and each is
asserted, not assumed:
1. resources-map passes NO namespace — its keys span gospel.* and pins.*;
2. the fallback walks the catalogue ROOT, which tStatic does by construction;
3. params survive, via the null-safe fillParams.
★ THE ROW THEY ASKED FOR, and it is the only thing here that could catch the
regression this migration risked: a BARE host under ar must render
pins.approximate in ARABIC — not the key, not gospel.pins.approximate, not the
English. It reads the SHIPPED ar/ and en/ pins.json and rebuilds tStatic's own
resolution order over them, so it measures the real catalogue rather than a stub.
Three negatives beside it, plus a control that both catalogues really carry the
key, so the comparison is measuring a difference that exists.
enLookup is deleted from all four, and the EN_MESSAGES import from three —
data-tables keeps it, because it still builds a map from EN_MESSAGES.gospel.res at
:182. Checked before deleting rather than after: check:no-free-identifiers would
have caught a wrong removal, since removing something still used creates a name
that is valid JS until it runs.
Two corrections that came from other agents reading this work:
- studio: the JSDoc carried <area>.<key>-shaped examples, which
check:i18n-keys-exist reads as real keys and reports missing. They reworded it
twice because my file copy restored it. Reworded, with a standing note in the
file so a third copy cannot bring them back.
- the register said each site "takes the CATALOGUE fallback, as it always did".
True of the two composables, FALSE of gospel's four, which were moved here by
their owner. A false statement inside a gate message is worse than no message,
because a reader has no reason to doubt it. Now accurate per row.
check:i18n-keys-exist is red on messages.engineNotLoadedDetail. NOT mine and not
touched here: it is in cities-internet/connectivity-map.vue, whose own comment says
the key "arrives with upg100's ade12e4c", and the call already guards for its
absence.
From regions-plugin e04121f1 re-cut as 7138109f on main 4d18a6f3. charts, data-tables and resources-list call
useOptionalT('gospel', { fallback: enLookup }); resources-map calls useOptionalT('') because its keys span two
areas (gospel.* and pins.*) and its enLookup walks the catalogue root, so a namespace would have turned
pins.approximate into gospel.pins.approximate. Each keeps the English fallback it already had.
useOptionalT's fillParams substitutes only non-null values (the rule main's own fill() already used), so
{ count: null } leaves the placeholder visible instead of printing "null". check:optional-t-equivalence
(59 assertions) asserts the empty namespace for resources-map and strips HTML comments before counting its
bare useI18n() calls.
The five are NOT one shape, and treating them as one would have changed what
readers see. Measured before touching them:
ApproxPinNote, FilterDropdown fall back to a literal map
SemanticTreeLegend, PosterWall fall back to humanizeKey() — 'legend.columns.name' renders 'Name'
PinHint falls back to a one-key map
SemanticTreeLegend, PinHint also capture i18n.te (used 3x and 1x)
PosterWall also captures i18n.locale
So useOptionalT grew an optional `fallback` hook, and useOptionalI18n was added
for the callers that need te and locale. Every site passes the fallback it
already had, so not one rendered string changes. Routing them through the
catalogue instead would have altered what seven bare-host bundles print, and —
because tStatic honours the runtime locale — would have started translating
strings that are English today. That may be an improvement; it is not this
commit's to make. Changing a default is not a migration.
te keeps its existing contract too: FALSE on a bare host, never "true because the
catalogue has it". PinHint and SemanticTreeLegend both record why — te is how
their callers know to use their own defaults.
THE CHECK NOW LIVES ON MAIN, which is the point of this commit as much as the
migration is. dx-shepherd: the 18-assertion version was in _qa-cycle, so it would
never have run again. internal/check-optional-t-equivalence.mjs is registered as
check:optional-t-equivalence — script line, //scripts note and gates:post token,
all inserted by hand rather than by re-serialising package.json. It carries 46
assertions: the helper's contract across all three host states, a branch-for-
branch equivalence against the old hand-written code, and a PER-SITE REGISTER
that every later C4 wave appends a row to. Negative-tested from outside: strip one
site's own fallback and it fails naming that site.
check:library-index went red on the new composable and is green again after
`bun run library-index`. That is the staleness gate working, not a flake.
C4, first wave. Twenty places each stored the same fact — how to translate when
the host never installed vue-i18n — and two of them, usePplrT.js and
useNeighborT.js, were whole-file near-duplicates at Jaccard 0.82. That pair was
the curation audit's evidence that the guard was being COPIED rather than shared.
Both now call library/composables/useOptionalT.js and keep their public names, so
no call site changes.
★ THE SPEC ASKED FOR (namespace, fallbackCatalogue) AND THE CATALOGUE IS
UNNECESSARY. Every copy imported its own English JSON and hand-walked it after
stripping the namespace prefix. But library/i18n builds `messages[locale][area]`
keyed by the JSON's own filename, and tStatic() already walks that tree and
already falls back to English. So `import enPplr from '.../en/pplr.json'` was a
second copy of bytes the bundle already had, and the helper takes one argument.
★ AND IT IS NOT A SIZE REGRESSION, which was the one good reason the narrow
import might have existed. The build NARROWS library/i18n's catalogue glob per
bundle to the areas internal/i18n-areas.mjs finds in that bundle's source graph
(check:i18n-treeshake). A bundle that says 'pplr.' gets the pplr area, not the
other thirty. Verified before writing the helper, because "the obvious dedup
makes every bundle carry every locale" would have killed it.
Resolution order, each step earning its place: the host's own vue-i18n when it
installed one, so a host managing locale keeps control; then tStatic, which
honours the runtime locale and falls back to English; then the key itself, so a
missing string is visible rather than blank. The middle step also covers i18n
being present but empty — i18n.t() returns the key unchanged, which every copy
of this pattern already treated as "not found".
Verified by _qa-cycle/02-builder-cycle/_chk-c4-optional-t-equivalence.mjs: 18
assertions across all three host states, with a branch-for-branch equivalence
check against the old hand-written implementation and two negative controls. It
extracts and executes the module source, because useOptionalT imports vue-i18n
and an i18n index that calls import.meta.glob, which plain Node cannot run.
