Re: Localized Pages

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

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.

Could you try automatic language detection with SourceForge 
(http://www.sourceforge.net)? SourceForge uses language preference 
detection based on PHP, roughly the same solution that was discussed 
here. And yes, SourceForge does this by default.


> > 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.

Yes, making aliases should be doable. Good point.

However, my initial suggestion was that the www.xx.gnome.org fall back 
to a pre-defined language (most likely one of the languages for that 
"country") only if no language preference could be detected. No matter 
what scenario, a language menu should be shown to override the results.

Likewise, my idea with www.gnome.org was that it should use language 
detection by default, but if that fails, it falls back to English. The 
fallback language being English would be the only difference.

This arrangement would make sure that if you have English in your 
language preference and go to gnome.org, you would get English by 
default. If you had no language preference at all, you would get English 
by default. If you had another language set in your preferences, you 
would however get that language.

The same situation here, a language menu is shown to override the 
results if they are not satisfactory. If the user selects a different 
language in the menu, it will be saved in a cookie and remembered.
This is, by the way, exactly how SourceForge does it.


> 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.

Good idea.


> 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?

I still think that it should respect the language setting in the browser 
by default. If it is ok for SourceForge, then why not for the GNOME web 
site? I think you should try SourceForges language detection and see if 
it works for you. If it does, your problem was with the debian.org 
implementation of language detection (debian.org uses Apache for 
language detection I think), and I don't see a good technical reason at 
all not to use language detection by default on the gnome pages to 
server content in the detected language.


Christian