Sylvain Wallez wrote:
Well, consider the state of Cocoon, the ASF, the opensource world and the whole IT industry: they're all anglo-centric. Would you have the same concerns if this was esperanto or interlingua rather than english (or more precisely "international english")?
Furthermore, translations must follow the original reference docs, which is the english one. So having all language-specific resources use the same name as their english counterpart isn't a problem to me.
Frankly, I'm not sure why we are even discussing I18n. It is one of those "previously-solved" problems that doesn't need a new solution. Heck, just use Cocoon :-) Seriously, Stefano's point here is right on the mark, in my opinion. There should only be one URL space. The locale is simply an attribute of how you access that URL space, not an inherent part of it.
Second, people like Nielsen argue that readable URLs are easier to use and to remember. I think it's bullshit. Not even my bookmarks satisfy me anymore in terms of link management (del.icio.us + google killed my browser bookmarks), do you really think I would type in or remember any URL today? nonsense.
I do remember a lot of URLs, provided of course that they are meaningful. And I have a very powerful tool to help me crawling in this tree of URLs that I know: the Firefox address bar autocompletion (which BTW just a reuse of the unix command-line behaviour).
And the more you use a URL, the more it engraves into your mind. Nothing new in the cognition area here, but that means that a lot of regular users of Cocoon know the URLs space of its documentation by heart, or at least the main directory names.
I can't even remember the URL of the Cocoon wiki and I go there a lot. That's because I alway just go to cocoon.apache.org/2.1 and click on the link. Any URL's beyond the main page are worthless to me.
Wait, wait! I haven't proposed to translate the docs!! This is a tremendous and effort! I proposed to just translate the introductory page to accompany the french-speaking mailing-list.
I'm not really sure what the value in that is, but whatever.
Ralph
