Re: Localized Pages

[Joakim Ziegler <joakim helixcode com>]

On Mon, Nov 27, 2000 at 11:15:55PM +0100, Christian Rose wrote:
> Joakim Ziegler wrote:

> Considering your example - do you have the same problem with 
> www.google.com? It is also automatically translated (but I think it may 
> use host redirection, I'm not sure).

No, Google seems to work fine. Debian fails consistently, though. It's hard
to say what exactly is the reason for this.


> The idea with local mirrors solves some of this, the problem is only 
> that I don't think any user would expect there to be mirrors with those 
> adresses. So either we re-direct users based on their host (which has 
> even more drawbacks) or we inform them directly on the gnome.org front 
> page about the local mirror (which then again would require that 
> information to be translated).

> Well, then again, setting local language as default on the local 
> mirrors, and use your suggestion, may be the best way to solve this. But 
> then the problem is that there will probably not be enough local mirrors...
> Relying on mirrors and explicitly directing international visitors to 
> these requires a lot of well maintained mirrors, with proper resources, 
> bandwidth, people to maintain hardware, etc. Then we have expanded the 
> problem with translation resources to the problem of setting up a lot of 
> well maintained mirrors, something of which I'm not sure was a necessary 
> step.

> My idea with the mirrors was for them to be a compliment to gnome.org 
> (easier to access than sending packages over the world over bad 
> networks), and for very local content to be hosted (gnome events in a 
> particular country). Not as a replacement for proper 
> internationalization of www.gnome.org, which is the official site to 
> most people.

We can do both. We can make www.xx.gnome.org always be an alias to
www.gnome.org, where the only effect it has is that you get another language,
up until the point where someone wants to claim that domain for a mirror site
in that specific country, and then we point it at their mirror instead.

This way, you can trust there being a www.xx.gnome.org for your country
(well, within reason), and the local mirrors will add extra value like faster
access and more content.

So, comments to this scheme I'm suggesting, where www.gnome.org is always in
English by default, but has a menu to select other languages, where the
detected language is the default choice, and then uses a cookie to store the
language preferences, and www.xx.gnome.org are all localized sites that may
or may not be hosted in the actual country?


-- 
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/