I think the concept missing is some form of tags, which at least allow for unique identification (e.g. link a vs link b). HTML on the message could be that, but usually that’s to low level for what you want translators to deal with – at least without also postprocessing the translated message. HTML also often includes things, which are supposed to be dynamic and are therefore not great for being put on a message string.
From a library standpoint it would be great if the returned value would support more than a translated string, but also a list or map of sorts, so translations can be interspersed with markup. E.g. with heex you want as much markup to be statically known as possible, so diffs can be optimized, while only the pieces of text in between should be dynamic.
I also think there’s might be opportunities to integrate gettext on an even lower level with the heex engine.
