Re: The state of our web site and standards

[Christian Rose <menthos df lth se>]

On Thu, 12 Apr 2001, Daniel Veillard wrote:
> > I also like to know how i18n should work if only static pages was to be
> > served. There's no way translations can be maintained (in the proper
> > sense of the word) with static pages.
>
>    Content negociation. Apache has direct support for switching
> the page served if the HTTP request put a different language order
> I think W3C uses that for their translated press releases.

I wasn't talking about content negotiation. I was talking about
maintaining translations; the process of translating and updating
translations. That's not something you want to do without a system like
gettext. So we need gettext. And thus my question: Which is easier? To use
gettext calls directly in the php pages, or have to do a backend with
scripts that generate static pages (how often? for all languages?
triggered how? triggered by whom?) using gettext in some way.


 > >    If you want the navigation stuff to be translated you
> can try PHP but as far as I can tell most large sites with
> required support for multiple languages actually have to serve
> them with different URL, the main example I know being the pages
> of the European Parliament:
>    http://www.europarl.eu.int/

That's really just a design choice. There are a lot of sites that use
content negotiation too; most notably http://www.google.com (that happily
serves me pages in my preferred language) but also sites like
http://docs.sun.com, http://sourceforge.net and http://www.debian.org.

I like content negotiation, but that's still somewhat offtopic. My point
is that I question that it would be easier to set up a complex system for
generating a lot of static pages than to build the pages with php and
serve them dynamically.

In my experience many people think that the problem with the Gnome web
pages today is that the WML system is complex and noone understands how it
works and thus noone wants to touch it, and thus it gets unmaintained.
Contrast this to PHP, which I believe not a single person on
gnome-web-list said he was unfamiliar with. A dynamic solution with PHP is
also what most people seem to want for the new gnome web site.

Anyway, I *really* hope we can move this discussion to gnome-web-list
from now on.


Christian