Re: [wgo] i18n interface

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 01:20 -0800, Alexander Limi wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:41:29 -0800, Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>  
> wrote:
> 
> >> - http://site.tld/produkte/meine-produkte
> >
> > That's a) unclear and b) allows conflicts with languages/locales that
> > just happen to have the same translation for that small part of the
> > text.
> 
> No, it has conflict resolution if the URL fragment is potentially the same.
> 
> >> - http://site.tld/de/products/my-products
> >
> > Yes, I personally think that translating URLs would be a disaster. As
> > well as being generally confusing it would mean that
> > a) The URL of translated versions of pages would change when the
> > translation changes, breaking the unchanging URL rule.
> 
> No, URLs are kept, even when translation changes. No breakage.
> 
> > b) It would not be easy to guess the URL of translated versions based on
> > the English original.
> 
> Guessing URLs is not a very fruitful thing to be doing anyway.

How else will people link to specific translations? Guessing URLs by
changing en to de is possibly not ideal, but at least it's possible.
Guessing a translation, in a language I don't speak, is impossible.

> The upside is that the translated URLs will give you better Google results  
> in that language.

Surely Google examines the _content_. Is there any evidence that Google
puts much weight on human-readable words that appear in URLs? 

Let me be clear, I'm totally against this kind of hack. It's not well
defined or easily understandable and it won't work in the real world.
This stuff should be deterministic.

-- 
Murray Cumming
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com