Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #66: (Proposed) Standards for Internationalizing Content

My intent with 3. cr_items which are localized versions of other cr_items have a cr_child_rel relationship to the original item, with the relationship type "localized". is that any localized items are directly related to the original item. If someone wants to track items which are translated from other items, the recommendation is to use a 'translated' cr_item_rel, but formal rules about what that means and how to deal with it should go in another TIP, which will extend but not invalidate this TIP.

So to rephrase my other question: disregarding translation vs localization issues, what's the difference between a cr_item_rel and a cr_child_rel? Is there currently any API in cr_items that uses either? If not, is there any guidance on how they are intended to be used, so that if that basic API ever gets built as intended, the data already in the system will be correct?

a cr_child_rel is for an item that should not really exist independent of the parent (an example would be the collection of images photo album creates for a single photo) and an cr_item_rel is for relating two items (like relating an author bio to an article for example); things related via cr_child_rel should be deleted when the parent is deleted but for cr_item_rel deleting one item should not affect the other.
Then cr_child_rel seems more appropriate for localizations.  By analogy to acs-lang, messages can't exist for a locale unless the message key exists for en_US.  For i18ned content, we will have the same thing except that the parent item could be of any locale, not just en_US.
This is also analogous to the use of folders. You could say that each content item "contains" all its localizations.