Re: Jumping in...

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 03:04:34AM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:

> Of course my main interest is localizing the gnome web site. We're 
> planning to provide a translated Swedish mirror of www.gnome.org 
> (http://www.se.gnome.org) but to do that we'd better have som sort of 
> built-in system for the web site localization before starting that, and 
> fixing the problem with lots of text in graphics that have to be 
> localized, and what better way is there to fix this than helping fixing 
> the main web site itself ;-)

This is indeed welcome, and brings up some things I've been thinking about
for a while. Specifically, there are a few nationalized mirrors around the
world (most notably the German and Italian ones, at least those are the ones
I've seen). These tend to be done separately from the main site, at most
using some of the graphics from it, etc.

In my ideal world, the sites would all be generated from the same place,
using the national language as the default, overridable by browser settings
and probably also a menu on the site. This would mean that every national
mirror would also be a mirror of the entire GNOME site in all languages,
which would help offload traffic and so on.

This raises a couple of issues. First of all, there's the matter of actually
generating multilingual content from the same sources. There are several ways
to do this, WML has a fairly primitive language diversion system, which can
be mimicked quite easily in any scripting language, and there's also things
like gettext, etc.

Additionally, if we're aiming for a distributed, 100% mirrorable structure,
we have to think very carefully about how we use databases, etc. Replication
is a non-trivial issue (as in, not really feasible), so we'd either have to
direct the database-driven parts of the site to the main site, or come up
with some other smart hacks. Suggestions welcome, as always.

Also, is it acceptable to the people running localized mirrors that we
centralize development like this? Or do you actually *prefer* doing a lot of
stuff on your own? To me, it seems like duplication of effort, but I don't
want to step on toes here.

-- 
Joakim Ziegler - Helix Code web monkey - joakim helixcode com - Radagast IRC
      FIX sysop - free software coder - FIDEL & Conglomerate developer
            http://www.avmaria.com/ - http://www.helixcode.com/