[ts] Request to collapse empty XML elements

[bjorn]

Steps to reproduce

1. Have a project using the .ts format
2. Notice that Weblate writes location info like <location line="+83"></location>
3. Since this is different from what Qt Linguist does (<location line="+83"/>), it leads to huge diffs when Weblate and Qt Linguist are used interchangeably.

Expected behaviour

Collapsing empty XML elements makes sense both for avoiding these huge diffs as well as for space-saving reasons, since it is unnecessary verbosity.

There are some other differences in the output (another example below), but the expanded XML elements are causing by far the most changes.

-<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> (Qt Linguist)
+<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?> (Weblate)

Server configuration

Using hosted Weblate (https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/tiled/)

[nijel]

This behavior comes from translate-toolkit, library we use for manipulation with the files.

The closing tags were added intentionally in translate/translate@e2b714e, see also translate/translate#1420.

For the header this was already discussed in https://github.com/nijel/weblate/issues/462, but I don't think anybody has talked with translate-toolkit upstream to address this.

[bjorn]

Ah, thanks for the pointers! It's interesting that they already tried to match the Qt Linguist format better, but the "Pretty-print empty tags without self-closing them" is only half the story, since while Qt Linguist does not self-close the translation element, it does self-close the location element. I'll see if I can do a pull request against translate.

[bjorn]

I've opened translate/translate#3443 for this.

[dg0yt]

Updated in translate/translate#3465. The difference which is left open is the handling of '/" vs. '/".

[dg0yt]

The first PR to translate got merged. Now i submitted translate/translate#3470 for writing quotes as entities. Since this requires postprocessing of the XML output, it somewhat slows down saving as .ts.

[nijel]

Closing this issue as there is nothing what could be done on Weblate side to improve this.

[bjorn]

@nijel You mean Weblate will automatically pick up this improvement once translate/translate#3470 is merged?

[bjorn]

Is Weblate already updated to use the improvements submitted in translate/translate#3465?

[nijel]

Weblate will use installed translate-toolkit, so whatever fixes it has, those will work in Weblate.