Choice of languages

R. Weisbloom · Dec 20, 2003

I have to write some websites that give the reader their choice of languages.
English and French. What is the best ways to go about it.
I was thinking of on the home page have buttons with the choice of languages, when the user decides which language they want direct them to that web page.
This means writing 2 websites.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?

Thanks,
Robert Weisbloom

David Dorward · Dec 20, 2003

R. Weisbloom said:
I have to write some websites that give the reader their choice of
languages. English and French. What is the best ways to go about it.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/multi/index-en.htm

brucie · Dec 21, 2003

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<META http-equiv=3DContent-Type content=3D"text/html; =
charset=3Dwindows-1255">
<META content=3D"MSHTML 6.00.2800.1276" name=3DGENERATOR>
<STYLE></STYLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY bgColor=3D#ffffff>
<DIV><FONT face=3DArial size=3D2>I have to write some websites that give =
the reader=20
their choice of languages.</FONT></DIV>

please post in plain text only and:

Crosspost, don't multipost
http://oakroadsystems.com/genl/unice.htm#xpost

Sjeef · Dec 21, 2003

"R. Weisbloom" <[email protected]> schreef in bericht
I have to write some websites that give the reader their choice of
languages.
English and French. What is the best ways to go about it.
I was thinking of on the home page have buttons with the choice of
languages, when the user decides which language they want direct them to
that web page.
This means writing 2 websites.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Robert Weisbloom

Look here for an example:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sjeef

In Dutch, English, German and Spanish.

JustAnotherGuy · Dec 21, 2003

Sjeef said:
I was thinking of on the home page have buttons with the choice of
languages, when the user decides which language they want direct them to
that web page.
This means writing 2 websites.
Does anyone have any other suggestions?
Thanks,
Robert Weisbloom

Look here for an example:
http://www.xs4all.nl/~sjeef
In Dutch, English, German and Spanish.

Ay, and they're all separate versions of the site. 4 websites.

Jukka K. Korpela · Dec 21, 2003

R. Weisbloom said:
I have to write some websites that give the reader their choice of
languages. English and French. What is the best ways to go about
it.

Make each page in English contain a link to the corresponding page in
French, and vice versa. Use the page's title (in the "other" language)
as the link text.

There are things you could add on top of this, but this is the start,
and the basis for anything else.

I was thinking of on the home page have buttons with the choice
of languages,
Don't.

when the user decides which language they want direct
them to that web page.

There's no reason to have a separate page for language selection when
you only have two languages. If the user gets the English version, it's
the one most of us want (sorry, francophones, but that's the way things
are at present), and those who prefer the French version can access it
with one click, just as with the separate language choice model, except
that now they have some idea of the page's content. (Most francophones
understand some English.)

This means writing 2 websites.

It means writing two versions of a site. That's what you are doing,
right? Surely the trouble of linking the pages together is very small
as compared with the skill and labor needed for creating the two
language versions.

DU · Dec 21, 2003

Jukka said:
Make each page in English contain a link to the corresponding page in
French, and vice versa.

I certainly agree with you on this. The HTML 4.01 specs suggests to use
<link rel="alternate" ...> E.g. from an english document:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="path/filename.html"
hreflang="pt" lang="pt" title="The title written in Portuguese language">

The good side of this is that Site Navigation bar can render such <link>
and indicate translated versions of pages. Some browsers do support
this: Mozilla for one.

W3C Quality Assurance tip: Use <link>s in your document
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/use-links

12.3.3 Links and search engines
"Authors may use the LINK element to provide a variety of information to
search engines, including:
* Links to alternate versions of a document, written in another
human language."
has several examples
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3.3

Use the page's title (in the "other" language)

as the link text.

There are things you could add on top of this, but this is the start,
and the basis for anything else.

[snipped]

DU

picayunish · Dec 21, 2003

DU said:
I certainly agree with you on this. The HTML 4.01 specs suggests to use
<link rel="alternate" ...> E.g. from an english document:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="path/filename.html"
hreflang="pt" lang="pt" title="The title written in Portuguese language">

The good side of this is that Site Navigation bar can render such <link>
and indicate translated versions of pages. Some browsers do support
this: Mozilla for one.

W3C Quality Assurance tip: Use <link>s in your document
http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/use-links

12.3.3 Links and search engines
"Authors may use the LINK element to provide a variety of information to
search engines, including:
* Links to alternate versions of a document, written in another
human language."
has several examples
http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/struct/links.html#h-12.3.3

That's interesting.
Thanx for the links.

Jukka K. Korpela · Dec 21, 2003

DU said:
The HTML 4.01 specs suggests to use
<link rel="alternate" ...>

I have mixed feelings about this. Since the large majority of people
are using browsers that don't support that idea, I think you should
have explicit <a href> links as well - unless you are authoring for a
narrow environment where all people use modern enough browsers.
And when you have <a href> links, the <link> links are duplication,
potentially even confusing.

Toby A Inkster · Dec 21, 2003

Jukka said:
I have mixed feelings about this. I think you should have explicit <a
href> links as well

Oh of course! Whenever <link> elements are used for navigation there ought
to be redundant text links for those browsers that don't understand them.

It is an interesting thought that there are often debates on whether
Internet Explorer "supports" XHTML 1.1. I mean, certainly with particular
MIME types, Internet Explorer can be made to display certain XHTML 1.1
pages correctly, but is this support? Anyway, in all that debate, we
forget that Internet Explorer doen't even support HTML 2.0 yet.

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Choice of languages

R. Weisbloom

David Dorward

brucie

Sjeef

JustAnotherGuy

Jukka K. Korpela

DU

picayunish

Jukka K. Korpela

Toby A Inkster

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