[Webcom] Portal urls of translated pages

[Dave Patton]

Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas wrote:

> My proposal is to add at the end of the url the ISO code for the
> language, for example:
> 
> the about page is:
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about.html
> 
> and the translated ones should be:
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about_ES.html
> http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about_IT.html
> ...

URIs don't have to match the on-disk directory structure,
so in that sense, it doesn't matter if the "about pages"
all reside in the same directory, or in directories that
are organized by ISO language code. However, if there isn't
a direct one-to-one correspondence between the URI and the
page's location, would webserver rewrite rules be made any
easier with a different system than that proposed above?

Looking at it from a different point of view, what makes
the most sense to people that are browsing the web? What
will people remember easiest? Where would they expect
Spanish-language "about" content to be located?:
http://www.osgeo.org/ES/content/foundation/about.html
http://www.osgeo.org/content/ES/foundation/about.html
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/ES/about.html
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/about_ES.html

One possible advantage of using an approach such as
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/ES/about.html
is that you can setup the index document for this URI:
http://www.osgeo.org/content/foundation/ES/
to present a Spanish-language page. In fact, you can
generalize that to produce a Spanish-language '404 page'
for any URI that contains "/ES/" when the target document
is not found.

-- 
Dave Patton

Canadian Coordinator, Degree Confluence Project
http://www.confluence.org/

Personal website - Maps, GPS, etc.
http://members.shaw.ca/davepatton/