Re: [wgo] i18n interface

["Simone Deponti" <shywolf9982 gmail com>]

My final thoughts on the issue are:

- LinguaPlone satisfies many of our requirements (all the basical ones, plus some advanced stuff) so for now we should go on with the latest stable version, since I think that there won't be problems in blending any future version with our current work.
- Meanwhile, we should rethink a bit the whole url mess. Honestly, my experience points out that us technical people tend to put a lot of importance on urls, while the normal user does not care. I'm not saying that we should go for urls like /mypage?obscureparam=<some hex value> but I either don't think that obsessing over purity of url helps.
- If we decide not to go the param way (REST forever in peace?) there are problems in both the /wgo/$lang/page approach as well as in the /wgo/mypage - /wgo/meinpage approach, however the second has more problems in terms of distinguishing between similar languages (portuguese and brazilian, for example).

IMHO, the way LinguaPlone currently works is the best, because:
- You can easily switch language. The url is not super-pretty, but not really uber-ugly, so we can get along with it.
- Google indexes it well. Google (Alexander, correct me if I'm wrong) puts quite a lot of importance to the url. So if I'm italian and I want to search for "desktop searching in gnome" I would likely write in the google toolbar "ricerca file in gnome", and if I have a page that goes 
http://www.gnome.org/ricerca-file-piu-facile-in-gnome (note that plone actually stripes out non ascii chars from the url, since that title would contain the special char ù instead of u: very, very cool feature) it will have more chances to get displayed.
- We can go with the current linguaplone, get something working, and see what doesn't go with it

Cheers

Simone

On 11/16/06, Alexander Limi <limi plone org> wrote:

On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 03:30:15 -0800, Murray Cumming < murrayc murrayc com>
wrote:

>> 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.

By using the language selector and choosing the language? When you select
the language, you will be redirected to the right document, no need to
guess at the URL. That's how it works at the moment.

>> 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?

I'll restrain myself from pulling out the "I work at Google" card... ;)

Yes.

If you go to any of the big news sites, notice how a lot of them have
started doing ugly hacks like:

http://news.com.com/Dell+delays+earnings+results+HP+on+for+Thursday/2100-1014_3-6136021.html?tag=nefd.lede

which is just inserting stuff that is ignored by the server application in
the URL, the actual URL to the page is:

http://news.com.com/2100-1014_3-6136021.html

> 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.

It works pretty well for the companies and organizations we have deployed
it for (Oxfam among others).

> This stuff should be deterministic.

Your opinion has been noted. Being new to GNOME, I don't really know the
decision structure, but I'll let others with opinions chime in if they
want.

The default URL behaviour in LinguaPlone is to translate the URLs too
(based on the document title, normally), but since we're likely to do some
adjustments and add some policies to help WGO get what they need, adding
support for keeping the URL always in English shouldn't be hard. Thanks
for your feedback and opinion to make LinguaPlone better.

--
_____________________________________________________________________

      Alexander Limi · Chief Architect · Plone Solutions · Norway

  Consulting · Training · Development · http://www.plonesolutions.com
_____________________________________________________________________

       Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content
   Plone Foundation · http://plone.org/foundation · Protecting Plone


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-- 
<Ivyshaur> No, we've been informed that listening to Rammstein is the best way to learn German.
<mrPants> You learn it very quick
<mrPants> The problem is that you only know how to talk about sodomy, canibalism, incest, and death
<granola> there are other things to talk about?
<mrPants> Not in germany