Re: [wgo] i18n url scheme (was i18n interface)

[Gergely Nagy <greg gnome hu>]

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 15:09 +0100, Quim Gil wrote:

> Going through Murray's concerns:


> > a) The URL of translated versions of pages would change when the
> > translation changes, breaking the unchanging URL rule.
> 
> No, the URL of translated pages would change when the original English
> URL would change. If there was a good reason to make a change in English
> this reason should be as good for the translated versions. I agree that
> in general we should avoid changing URLs, but this has nothing to do
> with translations.

I agree Quim, URLs need careful attention in general, it is not lang
specific.

A corner case might when the original url does not change, but the
meaning somehow shifts, asking for a different translation. (e.g.
www.gnome.org/code initially contains text about programming, but is
later changed to displaying passwords to the server. Since I can only
come up with silly examples, this will probably not be an issue ;)
Seriously, changing content in such a manner is bad anyway, the i18n
aspect just emphasizes it...

<snip/>

> 
> > Guessing a translation, in a language I don't speak, is impossible.
> 
> Then don't guess. :) Go to the page and select the desired translation
> in order to pick the URL.

Exactly. The language selection list is a feature, not a bug. 

> 
> > I'm totally against this kind of hack.
> 
> Apparently this is not a hack but the default behavior of LinguaPlone.
> 
> 
> > It's not well defined
> 
> The URL path is as translatable as any other text in the page. Is this
> going to work also with non-Western encoding? What else do we need to
> define? 
> 
> > or easily understandable
> 
> :)  Translated URLs are more understandable that untranslated.

I agree again with Quim here. It definitely increases URL friendliness,
thus usability.


All this goes with saying, that I am absolutely for including the
language code in the URL, whatever comes after that is less relevant.

While I mostly agree with Quim wrt all of the above, there is one issue
where translated URLs might be a problem. It is not guessing the
translated URL, but guessing the _untranslated_ URL.

Suppose you are on the translated page wgo/de/kapitel/seite, and want to
send this link to your English pal. You copy the URL to the email, close
the browser, and then you realize it's the German URL. You cannot simply
remove the language code...

Question is, how big is this issue? If there is an obvious "link me!"
element on the pages, with high visibility, people might not copy the
wrong URL in the first place...

We should really push for people to circulate the "generic" URLs, since
that is the whole point. Having localized URLs definitely weakens this
point, so there is a trade off either way.


Greg