Re: Translating the GNOME 2.12 release notes

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Thu, 2005-08-18 at 18:28 +0300, Tommi Vainikainen wrote:
> On 2005-08-18T17:19:14+0300, murrayc murrayc com wrote:
> > The release notes will be ready for translation on August 31st,
> > giving you one week for translation before the release on September
> > 7th.
> 
> I just wonder if any of you have heard about HTTP content negotiation?

Yeah, that could be nice, but it's really an issue for the
gnome-web-list. Right now, I'm more concerned with actually generating
the content in the first place.

> Content negotiation is a way for the web browser to send accepted
> languages in a HTTP request and get the best translation (according to
> user's preferences) as return. For example Debian's website uses this
> technique, and you can read more at
> <URL: http://www.debian.org/intro/cn >
> 
> Of course there are some proxies et cetera in wild which have broken
> support for this technique, and therefore sometimes at least Debian
> gets feedback because of badly configured browsers or broken proxy
> servers, but IMHO the technique works well.
> 
> As a translator this is interesting question for me because having a
> link "http://www.gnome.org/start/2.12/notes/"; select language
> automatically would increase visibility of translations as users no
> longer need to manually select translation every time.
> 
> To use such technique, the pages need to be named in a way that HTTP
> server's content negotiation module understands those to be same page,
> and content negotiation module loaded -- that should be enough.
> 
> In Apache it would mean that when english page is notes/index.html,
> then Finnish translation is index.fi.html (or index.html.fi depending
> on some settings), and French translation is index.fr.html (or
> index.html.fr). Then user accesses URL http://www.g.o/s/2.12/notes/ or
> .../notes/index and gets version of the page according to his/her
> browser settings. (Technically it sends Accept-Language header in HTTP
> request.)

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